Monday Evening News, Links, And Views

Wow, the UK thinks it won't be until 2020 before the country sees significant results from fracking.

UK Energy Secretary Ed Davey has urged caution regarding hype around the country's burgeoning shale gas industry, warning that the UK cannot rely on shale has to solve its energy challenges during the current decade.

In a speech titled "The Myths and Realities of Shale Gas Exploration" given Monday to The Royal Society, London, Davey said:

"We may have been fracking in Britain's offshore waters for years. The US may have been fracking onshore for years. But in Britain, fracking for onshore gas in shale, at any significant scale, is something new.

"Nobody can say, for sure, how much onshore UK shale gas resource exists. Or how much of it can be commercially extracted. So let's be cautious about hyperbole on shale.

"For it would likely be the 2020s before we might feel any benefits in full. So we can't bank on shale gas to solve all our energy challenges, today or this decade. And in the next decade, shale, by itself, will not come close to solving even our basic energy resource security challenge."

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On top of a triple-digit advance on Wall Street today, futures look positive for tomorrow. Oil is dropping another dollar. That, by the way, is good news, even for Bakken operators, as we have discussed before. 

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So, it's down to this for Ben's replacement at the Fed: Yellen, Summers, Geithner.

Rather Obama, hyper aware of growing economic inequalities, avidly wants to lessen them. To do so, he must promote economic growth calculated to help lead the country’s downtrodden out of poverty, and would need a new Federal Reserve chairman to tolerate far higher inflation levels than previous chairmen. So, Geithner might just fit the President’s bill.

Again, wrong: the president has no concern for the "downtrodden." Geithner may get the nod, but not because the president is concerned about the widening gap between the "haves" and the "have-nots."

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