Fracking Boondoggle Now Entering a New Phase or Phases

The PAST is part of NOW, and the FUTURE will be partly NOW!

From a Special Essay by David Wallace-Wells, New York Times Service, July 27, 2022

In the energy scramble provoked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, American liquid natural gas has so far played the role of Europe’s white knight. If Europe manages to keep its lights on, homes heated and factories running this winter, when energy demand is highest, it will be in large part thanks to shipments of American gas, which have more than doubled since the war began.

Today, two-thirds of American oil and even more of its gas come from hydraulic fracturing, better known as fracking, which has played this heroic-seeming role before, in the country’s long effort post-9/11 to get out from the grip of Middle Eastern producers and secure what is often described as “energy independence.” (Donald Trump preferred the term “energy dominance.”)

It hasn’t proved quite as useful as you might think: Because energy prices are set on global markets, domestic production doesn’t mean Americans pay less at the pump. But thanks in large part to fracking, the United States has become the world’s largest producer of both oil and gas.

Perhaps the most striking fact about the American hydraulic-fracturing boom, though, is unknown to all but the most discriminating consumers of energy news: Fracking has been, for nearly all of its history, a money-losing boondoggle, profitable only recently, after being propped up by so much investment from Wall Street and private equity that it resembled less an efficient-markets no-brainer and more a speculative empire of bubbles like Uber and WeWork.

The American shale revolution did bring the country “energy independence,” whatever that has been worth, and more abundant oil and gas. It has indeed reshaped the entire geopolitical landscape for fuel, though not enough to strip leverage from Vladimir Putin.

But the revolution wasn’t primarily a result of some market-busting breakthrough or an engineering innovation that allowed the industry to print cash. From the start, the cash moved in the other direction; the revolution happened only because enormous sums of money were poured into the project of making it happen.

[Please subscribe to the services of the outstanding newspapers in the United States as their cash flow has been quite low in many cases. ADM]

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See Also: ‘Irreversible’: No easy fix for water fouled by gas driller in Dimock, Pennsylvania — Residents have been fighting for clean water for 14 years, Michael Rubinkam/ The Associated Press (WITF), February 18, 2022

(Dimock) — One of the best-known pollution cases ever to emerge from the U.S. drilling and fracking boom has entered a difficult new phase as prosecutors pursue criminal charges against Pennsylvania’s most prolific gas driller — and push for a settlement they say could yield more significant benefits for affected homeowners than a conviction.