The American: The Natural Gas Boom: Questions and Complications

Complex changes do not bring unalloyed benefits, and rather than adhering to a simplistic infatuation with new riches, we should recognize a number of already obvious complications and ask a number of necessary questions.

America has been buoyed by an abundance of natural gas. The bulk of its vast resources of this precious fuel is locked in shale formations under more than 20 states, unable to escape without drilling horizontal wells through the most promising layers and fracturing the rocks surrounding the bores with highly pressurized mixtures of water, chemicals, and sand. Use of this process, decades in the making, expanded rather suddenly after 2007, and it has become widely known by the rather unappealing term “fracking.”

The facts are easy to summarize. Thanks to a rapid expansion of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, the United States in 2009 again became the world’s top producer of natural gas. Gas imports (mainly by pipelines from Canada) peaked as recently as 2007 at nearly 20 percent of the total supply; in 2013 they were just 11 percent. In 2013, the gas supplied 27 percent of the country’s primary energy use (compared to about 23 percent a decade ago), and its combustion generated 30 percent of the nation’s electricity in 2012 and 27 percent in 2013 (compared to about 18 percent a decade ago).
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