AMERICA


The Fracas Over


By Andrew Henry


SMALL ARMY OF PROTESTERS descended on Albany, N.Y., in July waving signs and chant- ing slogans. The throng marched from one state-government offi ce to the next as police watched nervously. A mother in the crowd held an infant in one arm and in the other a sign reading, “My Babies Count Too.” A pro-labor demonstration? Or an anti-war march?


A


Actually, the protests targeted a new oil-drilling technology so prom- ising it could add tens of thousands of jobs to the economy, and even hold the key to fi nally reducing America’s long-standing dependence on foreign oil.


Who could oppose that? In New York, apparently, a lot of people. Called hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” the process injects water and sand deep underground


to


release petroleum and natural gas trapped beneath the surface. The economic benefi t of fracking has already been felt in natural gas


12 NEWSMAX / SEPTEMBER 2011


‘FRACKING’


Short for hydraulic fracturing, this new technology could unleash vast oil and natural gas reserves, but environmentalists are wary.


markets. In 2000, shale gas was just 1 percent of U.S. supplies; today it is 25 percent. That shift has halved the price of natural gas in America. For decades, petroleum engi- neers thought fracking could only be used to produce natural gas, not oil. It wasn’t until 2007 that scien- tists modifi ed the technique to cre- ate “artifi cial permeability” in shale, coaxing to the surface oil that was previously unreachable.


The full promise of the new tech- nology emerged about three years ago in a U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) report on how much frack- ing could boost production in the Bakken formation, a region of shale stretching from North Dakota into eastern Montana.


Previously, the USGS had esti- mated there were 115 million barrels of recoverable oil seeping through the gray Bakken shale — a drop in the bucket for a country that imports over 9 million barrels a day. Then in April 2008, the USGS announced that thanks to fracking, the fi eld’s recoverable oil reserves


were 25 times greater than previously believed — as much as 4.3 billion bar- rels. Overnight, Bakken became the largest oil-bearing formation in the lower 48 states.


Today, major shale deposits, many of them already producing oil, exist in 21 Western and Southern U.S. states, and along a huge swath of the Midwest into the Northeast. One of them is the massive Marcellus shale formation in Pennsylvania and New York. What triggered the ire of the environmentalists who marched on Albany was Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s decision to partially lift the Empire State’s ban on fracking.


hat is fracking’s potential to alle- viate America’s growing depen- dence on foreign oil? By 2015, oil ana- lysts say, new fi elds in North Dakota, Texas, California, and a slew of other states could yield up to 2 million bar- rels of oil a day.


W


That’s more than the entire Gulf of Mexico currently produces, and you don’t have to send a rig 100 miles offshore to get it.


Experts say new oil wells could raise domestic production by 20 percent in the next fi ve years. The Associated Press has reported that over the next decade, it could reduce oil imports by half.


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84  |  Page 85  |  Page 86  |  Page 87  |  Page 88  |  Page 89  |  Page 90  |  Page 91  |  Page 92  |  Page 93  |  Page 94  |  Page 95  |  Page 96  |  Page 97  |  Page 98  |  Page 99  |  Page 100  |  Page 101  |  Page 102  |  Page 103  |  Page 104  |  Page 105  |  Page 106  |  Page 107  |  Page 108  |  Page 109  |  Page 110  |  Page 111  |  Page 112  |  Page 113  |  Page 114  |  Page 115  |  Page 116