Gas from Shale

I remember that in high school when I played a simulation game about the US energy future, circa 1983, we always ran out of natural gas in ten years. I never believed that dire forecast, but I think even the most optimistic 1980s forecasts about future natural gas supplies have proved well short of the supplies we can now tap. This is because of new technology that allows us to extract gas from shale rock. A bunch of horizontal tunnels are drilled through the rock, and then the rock is fractured with high pressure blasts of water and sand. The gas then escapes and can be recovered. It seems that the shale formations that underlie much of the Appalachians, the Ozarks, and the Gulf coast holds around 100 years of supply at our current rate of consumption.

There seem to be two poles to energy debate, the "We are all doomed!" pole and the "No problem!" pole. Our technology prowess has proved the doomsayers wrong time and again. We are not going to run out of energy. On the other hand, I don't think that means there is no problem. There is always an environmental cost to new energy sources -- ask anyone who has ever lived near a drilling operation -- and while burning natural gas is less of a greenhouse threat than burning coal, it still creates carbon dioxide.

The problem is always the cost. Energy efficiency is still the long-term solution, supported by renewable power sources like wind and sun.