How Shale Gas Snuck Up on the Beltway Elites and How Politics Could Disrupt the Success Story

AEI’s Steve Hayward has an excellent article on “The Gas Revolution” in the Weekly Standard, here are some key paragraphs:

“One remarkable aspect of the shale gas revolution is that it was not the product of an energy policy edict from Washington, or the result of a bruising political battle to open up public lands and offshore waters for new exploration. Although the Halliburtons of the world are now big in the field, its pioneers were mostly smaller risk-taking entrepreneurs and technological innovators. George P. Mitchell, an independent producer based in Houston, is widely credited as being the prime mover in shale gas, pushing the idea against skeptics. The technology was mainly deployed on existing oil and gas leaseholds or on private land beyond the reach of bureaucrats (for the time being, anyway). That is why shale gas seemed to sneak up unannounced to the media and Beltway elites, even though people inside the gas industry realized several years ago what was rapidly taking place. Mitchell worked the Barnett shale formation near Dallas, but the biggest shale gas “play” is the Marcellus​—​a massive deep shale formation stretching from West Virginia through upstate New York.

Now that shale gas is front-page news, everyone wants a piece of the action. Environmentalists, who have supported natural gas as a “bridge fuel” to kill coal, are starting to turn against gas now that it looks more abundant. Regulators want to regulate it; state legislators want to tax it more. And politicians are eager to “help” the market decide how best to use this newfound bounty, which is music to the gas industry’s ears, as they fear a glut might collapse prices and do to their industry what the collapse in oil prices in 1986 did to the small producers in the oil patch. In other words, the one thing that might disrupt this amazing success story has arrived on the scene: politics.”

Steve ends his article with this last sentence: “It would be best if politicians left well enough alone and allowed the marketplace to compete over the uses of natural gas, but politics and energy have always mixed like gin-ethanol and tonic, so don’t count on it.”

MP: The chart above displays annual natural gas production in the U.S. back to 1936, and shows that domestic production has set new annual records in each year since 2007. For the last several years the U.S. has been the world’s largest gas producer starting when it surpassed Russia in 2009.

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