USGS Ups The Ante On Shale

Power: Despite efforts in the media and Congress to shut it down through fear and falsehoods, a new estimate of America's most promising energy source portends even more gas, oil — and jobs.

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) announced Tuesday that the Marcellus Shale formation that straddles the northeastern United States may hold a staggering 84 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of recoverable natural gas, up significantly from the last official government estimate of 2 tcf made in 2002.

The USGS said the estimate came from new information about the gas-rich formation underlying New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia, and from technical improvements in how wells are drilled and the gas is extracted.

Those who argue that the world is running out of fossil energy are wrong once again. They ignore the fact our resources are limited only by our imagination and the will to develop them.

The 84 trillion tcf figure is the mean of a range of possible gas volumes. There's a 95% chance that the formation has 43 tcf of gas and a 5% chance it may hold as much as 144 tcf. In addition, the formation may hold anywhere from 1.5 billion to 6.1 billion barrels of natural gas liquids.

This news strikes terror in the hearts of environmentalists, and government ideologues simply cannot handle shale gas and the prospect of what it holds for the American future. Shale gas doesn't require a government subsidy like wind and solar energy do; it is profitable, abundant and versatile in that it can be used to power the grid and as a transportation fuel.

Unable to attack natural gas itself, the cleanest burning of the fossil fuels, greenies and their sycophants in the media and government have attacked the safety of hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," the method used to extract the oil and gas trapped in the prehistoric porous rock. It poses dangers to the water supply, they insist.

The New York Times in particular has run a series of articles filled with hyperbole and questionable sourcing, particularly one by Ian Urbina. It claims shale gas and the fracking process has been "oversold," the fluids injected into the rock are full of icky stuff and the wastewater produced is "often laced with highly corrosive salts, carcinogens like benzene and radioactive elements like radium."

The mixture used to fracture shale is in fact a benign blend of 90% water, 9.5% sand and 0.5% chemicals such as the sodium chloride of table salt and the citric acid of the orange juice you had for breakfast. It can take up to 2.1 million gallons of water to clean the solar panels per megawatt of electricity vs. an estimated 1.8 million gallons per megawatt of oil shale.

Shale formations in which fracking is employed are thousands of feet deep; drinking water aquifers are generally only a hundred feet deep. Between them is solid rock. A 2010 Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection report concluded that "no groundwater pollution or disruption of underground sources of drinking water has been attributed to hydraulic fracturing of deep gas formations."

Earlier this year, Democrats opposed to domestic energy development introduced the Fracturing Responsibility and Awareness of Chemicals (FRAC) Act designed to put fracking, already well-regulated at the state level, under the regulatory authority of an EPA already killing the economy by regulation.

Researchers at Penn State say the Marcellus Shale has already created 44,000 jobs in Pennsylvania and added $4 billion to the economy in 2009, plus 13,000 jobs in West Virginia and $1 billion to the economy there. Further development could mean almost 300,000 new jobs and $25 billion added to the regional economy over the next decade.

Maybe President Obama can drive his armored, fossil-fuel-powered Canada-made bus from Martha's Vineyard through the Marcellus on his way back to energy- and imagination-deprived Washington, D.C.