Another Great Bakken Article in the WSJ -- The US is #1 in Natural Gas Production -- Who Wudda Thought?

This link sent to me by Don, so I am gradually catching up with blogging. For newbies, you may want to scroll down quite a ways. I think I have posted half a dozen stories so far, and updated many older posts for the archives on the sidebar at the right.

"The Shale Gas Secret" in the WSJ is a great, great read. Early one the article mentions one man who decided to go "all-in" and built a huge business on shale gas. (The president would disagree: "If you have a business, you didn't build it. It was built by someone else." Harold Hamm must be apoplectic.)

But a great, great article.

We mention this because that blessing of American jurisprudence helps explain one of the few bright patches in the Obama economy—the booming production of shale gas and, increasingly, oil. The U.S. ranked 159th in GDP growth last year. But in natural gas production, it's now No. 1.

How did that happen? Partly it's the luck of geology, though plenty of other countries have abundant shale resources. Partly, too, it's American technological leadership in developing hydraulic fracturing (fracking) and horizontal drilling. But those techniques are now widely understood the world over.

Meantime, some of the property owners who leased their mineral rights to companies like Dvorin have received royalty checks, typically worth at least 12.5% of production value. That's encouraged further leasing and exploration, generated popular momentum for fracking, and brought development to previously depressed regions such as western Pennsylvania and the Bakken area of North Dakota.

Now compare this to Europe, which sits on an estimated 639 trillion cubic feet of shale gas yet remains heavily dependent on Russian imports. The governments of France and Bulgaria have banned fracking on dubious safety grounds, with nary any pushback from their publics. That might not be the case if French farmers, for example, were able to profit from the riches underneath their terroir.