History may be in the making. May 2013 is perhaps the first time ever that natural gas prices have increased on forecasts of warmer than normal temperatures in the coming summer months and, a few weeks later, fell on forecasts for milder weather in June. These developments are significant because natural gas has long been [...]
The year 2012 marked the 10-year anniversary of natural gas drilling and production in the Barnett Shale in North Texas. While a thousand or so Barnett Shale wells had been drilled in the 20 years after the first well was drilled in 1981, drilling activity blasted off in 2002. By year-end 2012, some 18,591 natural [...]
Manufactured issues relating to the natural gas and oil industry are unending. The industry is constantly defending itself against improper information that is either out of context or inaccurate. Case in point, in a recent press briefing, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney responded to a question concerning the sequester’s mandatory spending cuts by saying, “So [...]
The game-changing development of the Barnett Shale unleashed a torrent of natural gas supplies in the United States. Supplies increased so quickly as other gas shales were developed that natural gas supplies outpaced demand, causing prices to decline since mid-2008, and now becoming fairly stable for the last year or so. Even though many exploration [...]
Emissions of carbon dioxide in the U.S. are now lower than they were in the year 2000 and are expected to continuing declining, according to the U. S. Energy Information Agency (EIA) in their “Annual Energy Outlook 2012.” Furthermore, the EIA says that carbon dioxide emissions in the electricity-generating sector fell so much in the [...]
Based on the recent experience with shale gas, the price of crude oil will be trending down, assuming of course that politics does not get in the way and the Middle East situation does not deteriorate. We are talking about the underlying price trend here not short-term price fluctuations. Just look at the recent history [...]
The United States Energy Information Agency (EIA) released its “Annual Energy Outlook 2012” earlier this year. The annual report shows that emissions of carbon dioxide in the U.S. are now lower than levels in the year 2000 and are predicted to continue to decline through the year 2035 (which is the extent of the study [...]
We don’t give a second thought to many things in our daily lives until those things become hard to get or costly. We don’t think about where electricity comes from when we turn on a light switch nor do we give much thought to the many steps it takes for gasoline to be readily available [...]
Ever since the Environmental Defense Fund published a paper by Al Armendariz in 2009 alleging that emissions of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from natural gas operations in the Barnett Shale are greater than VOCs from all the cars and trucks in the region, the statement has been repeated over and over as if it were fact (for [...]
The fact that natural gas is the cleanest-burning fuel, emitting half of the carbon of coal, is undisputed. After all, the chemical structure of methane, the primary component of natural gas, is CH4: one carbon molecule combined with 4 hydrogen molecules. By contrast, coal is 50-100% carbon by mass, with the rest being hydrogen, nitrogen [...]
