His 4000 word essay in American Interest is here. It’s a pretty positive vision of an american future that would be export-based. Shale gas, MITx courses and robotics all play important roles…along with maturing developing countries that develop a real taste for what we make best. I worry that he doesn’t factor in externals such as climate change, food production ceilings and the propensity for our primate brains to get the best of us. But it’s an important piece and it helps counter the declinist conventional wisdom.
Category: Shale gas
Opposing reports on US Shale gas supplies
In today’s NY Times here.
Money quote:
In private discussions, some federal energy officials have raised questions about the way oil and gas companies may be inflating estimates of the amount of recoverable gas.
“The variability of shale gas well performance is crucial to any assessment of the resource potential of a shale play,” Philip Budzik, an Energy Information Administration research analyst, wrote in an e-mail to an industry analyst last April.
It’s larger than that actually. My guess it it’s the same competing political agendas that have complicated the Keystone Pipeline debate and the environmental safety of fracking technologies. That debate is playing out on many levels simultaneously and its outcome will no doubt be important to US Energy policy as it plays out (or doesn’t) over the next decade.
Discoverers and Discoveries 