ent approach that shifts a greater risk and cost burden to the contractors,” he wrote. Ultimately, any company heavily exposed to the US defense sector faces risks now, with future programs facing the greatest uncertainties.
Energy
Exciting things are happening in the energy industry. And manufacturers who innovate, engineer and supply the tools needed to extract, capture, generate, store and trans- port that energy are at the forefront.
Thanks to their innovation and engineering, a surge in shale oil and natural gas production in the US has put energy independence in the nation’s sights. In fact, it is causing the world to redraw its global energy map, as well as the financial and political maps inevitably influenced by the world’s intense demand for energy. On Nov. 12, 2012, the world took notice when the Interna- tional Energy Agency (IEA) released its annual World Energy Outlook, which captured headlines worldwide with its predic- tion that by 2020 the US would overtake Saudi Arabia as the largest global oil producer.
ME Senior Editor James Sawyer laid witness to this development on a recent visit to Pittsburgh, an old hotbed of
energy production and manufacturing made new again by fracking in the Marcellus Shale play, calling it “Houston on the Monongahela.” Saw- yer witnessed first- hand what the IEA said in that report: “Energy develop- ments in the United States are profound and their effect will be felt well beyond North America—and the energy sector. In fact, the boom in shale gas and oil extraction has come on and grown so quickly that a short-
age of equipment seems to be one of the few things slowing down the North American energy industry. Moutray, the chief economist at NAM, wrote in our January issue that the development of the nation’s shale gas resources could create one million new manufacturing jobs by 2025. What’s more, he wrote that our na- tion’s low industrial energy costs, partly driven by the increas- ing supply of energy, offset other cost dis- advantages here, which is ultimately helping to drive reshoring of manu- facturing to the US. But it’s not just the very real explo- sion of fracking in the US that’s causing all the buzz. New energy innovations are cropping up in wind, solar and elsewhere, even fossil fuels, as companies
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ManufacturingEngineeringMedia.com | April 2013
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