The Energy Revolution That Keeps Carbon On Top -- Implications for the Bakken, North Dakota, USA

Link here. -- Bloomberg

This is an incredible analysis of the energy revolution: horizontal drilling and fracking.
nology.

In the meantime, however, a real revolution has happened in traditional energy -- one that poses a serious challenge to companies and investors betting on alternative energy. This breakthrough is arguably one of the greatest advances in energy production since the 1960s. And it came not from a Silicon Valley company, or from MIT or Stanford, but from the son of a Greek goatherd who immigrated to the U.S.

George Mitchell was born in Galveston, Texas, went to Texas A&M University and, in 1946, founded an oil-drilling and real- estate business. The company did well, and in the 1980s, Mitchell decided to take on a major technical challenge: He would try to coax gas out of a portion of the Barnett shale, which lies deep under Fort Worth and 15 counties in north- central Texas. 

And, of course the rest is history: horizontal drilling and fracking.

The author, unfortunately spends too much time on anthropogenic global warming, but at least points out the following:

A more serious problem is that both collecting and burning natural gas produce carbon dioxide, the main culprit in global warming. Gas producers never miss a chance to point out that burning gas emits less CO2 than burning coal does. But detailed research (including some of my own) shows that, in practice, switching from coal-fired electricity plants to gas-fired ones would have almost no effect on global warming. In fact, some scientists who have tried to do a full accounting of the emissions due to gas produced by fracking have concluded that it actually ends up putting more CO2 into the atmosphere than coal does. 

As I noted just a few days ago, global warming caused significant environmental changes in 8,000 B.C, a millenium not exactly known for us its of oil. But global warming is no longer debated in the science arena, it's debated (usually one-sided) in the op-ed pages of mostly irrelevant print media.

Not so long ago, many people believed that the cost of oil and gas would rise indefinitely, thus supporting the market for alternatives. Mitchell’s miracle [horizontal fracking] has changed that calculus, much to the chagrin of the Silicon Valley venture capitalists who caught the green-energy bug.