Free Republic

After several cash-lean budget years that prompted spending cuts and other austerity measures, a big revenue boom has hit New Mexico. State lawmakers will have an estimated $1.2 billion in “new” money available in the coming budget year due to unprecedented oil production levels and overall economic growth, according to new revenue figures released today by legislative and executive economists. “This spike is unprecedented,” Legislative Finance Committee chief economist Jon Clark told members of a key legislative panel during a meeting in Taos. “We’re relying on the oil industry more than we ever have before.” The eye-opening revenue figure —...

Ending a five-year moratorium, the Trump administration Wednesday took a first step toward opening 1.6 million acres of California public land to fracking and conventional oil drilling, triggering alarm bells among environmentalists. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management said it’s considering new oil and natural gas leases on BLM-managed lands in Fresno, San Luis Obispo and six other San Joaquin Valley and Central Coast counties. Meanwhile, activists in San Luis Obispo are pushing a ballot measure this fall to ban fracking and new oil exploration in the county. If BLM goes ahead with the plan, it would mark the first...

... The event I refer to is the drilling of the first well which would use hydraulic fracturing to crack shale rock, thereby releasing the gas beneath the rock. Put differently, it was 20 years ago that “fracking” was born. ... The volumes of natural gas, natural gas liquids, and crude oil that this technique has uncovered all over the country have been unfathomable, and over the last decade alone has caused the United States to more than double their crude oil production on an absolute basis, and to surpass Russia and Saudi Arabia in production on a relative basis....

Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFÉ) standards were devised back in 1975, amid anxiety over the OPEC oil embargo and supposedly imminent depletion of the world’s oil supplies. Of course, barely 15 years after Edwin Drake drilled the first successful oil well in 1859, a Pennsylvania geologist was saying the United States would run out of oil by 1878. In 1908, the US Geological Survey said we’d exhaust our domestic oil reserves by 1927; in 1939, it moved petroleum doomsday to 1952.Somehow, improved technology and geological acumen kept finding more oil. Then the horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (fracking) revolution postponed the...

The success of this marriage would unlock oil in tight oil and shale oil deposits that had previously been too expensive to recover, and would result in one of the greatest oil booms the world had ever seen. In fact, the "fracking revolution" caused U.S. oil production to turn upward in 2009, and then rise over the next seven years at the fastest rate in U.S. history. While it is still true that OPEC still produced 42.6% of the world's oil in 2017, the majority of new oil production since 2008 has come from the U.S.It is hard to overstate...

The energy sector had been shielded from pressure to innovate by high oil prices. When prices fell 75% over 20 months beginning in 2014, oil and gas companies were finally forced to modernize to squeeze out profits. Many found they could use new technologies to do the work better and cheaper, with fewer people.

One Trump Administration achievement has been liberating U.S. energy producers of all kinds from federal shackles. Companies have responded with jobs and investment, but all of a sudden the Administration wants to do a Barack Obama imitation and play energy favorites. The National Security Council on Friday reviewed a 41-page internal memo, leaked to Bloomberg News, suggesting that President Trump invoke emergency authority to require grid operators to buy nuclear and coal power. But there’s no emergency, and the political intervention will do more harm than good. *** The supposed problem is that the U.S. is producing an abundance of...

Not to distract from the eye-popping salaries of top energy executives, but there is something else eye-opening about comparing oil and gas CEOs to the average oil and gas worker. The median workers at these companies, at least the ones producing most of natural gas in Pennsylvania, are doing quite well. Yes, they still might earn 100 times less than their CEOs, but just try sneezing at these median compensation numbers. •CNX Resources: $129,390 •Range Resources: $123,500 •Chesapeake Energy: $118,761 •Southwestern Energy: $108,458 •EQT: $102,470 •Cabot Oil & Gas: $75,891 With about 8,500 employees among them, these Marcellus Shale operators...

A recent media report on a peer-reviewed study based on 180 samples from water wells near Ohio fracking sites was headlined: “Univ. of Cincy fracking study finds surprising groundwater results.” What exactly was so surprising? The report is one of more than two dozen scientific studies published since 2010 that concluded fracking is not a major threat to groundwater. No fewer than 10 peer-reviewed studies examining more than 3,000 water wells across virtually every major U.S. shale play have been released in the past five years, with each one finding no evidence of that fracking has contaminated groundwater. The reason?...

Trump Opens Door to Dangerous Fracking in Northern Arizona A new Trump administration plan proposes to auction off 4,200 acres of public land for oil and gas development in northern Arizona. The lands straddle the Little Colorado River, are within three miles of Petrified Forest National Park, and are near habitat for a federally threatened fish called the Little Colorado spinedace. Drilling and fracking would threaten to deplete and pollute groundwater in the Little Colorado River Basin. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is planning the September auction—which would convey development rights to fossil-fuel companies—without any site-specific public or environmental...

Robert Mueller’s politicized investigation into allegations that President Trump or the Trump campaign or some Trump associate somehow colluded with Russians continues unproven but unabated. Many think partisan politics ensure it will not be concluded or terminated before the fall 2018 elections.Federal District Court Judge T. S. Ellis may have rebuked Mueller for attempting to wield “unfettered power” and actually being motivated primarily by a desire to hurt the President. But Mr. Mueller seems determined to find collusion somewhere – except where it seems blatantly obvious: in former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s dealings with Putin oligarchs and the Clinton...

Protests by environmentalists against hydraulic fracturing (or fracking) have been going on for years now, along with the Hollywood efforts of serial fabulists such as Josh Fox. One of the biggest concerns surrounding the process is the possibility of contamination of groundwater. While a previous study in Pennsylvania by the state Department of Environmental Protection revealed zero instances of this happening (except for surface spills during transport of hydraulic fluids), critics discounted the study and the protests continued. Now a different study conducted in Ohio on the Utica shale play has been completed and published. They were looking for evidence...

Is truth stranger than fiction? Usually not, if the author of fiction tries to write something strange. However, the second paragraph of this report by my conservative cousin from New York is both true and stranger than fiction: New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has apparently become unhinged by the primary challenge from the Left of “Sex and the City” co-star Cynthia Nixon. In an effort to get to the Left of Nixon, Cuomo has descended into a bizarre fantasy world. To stop the Interior Department’s approval of offshore drilling, he vows “to commission a citizen fleet from throughout the state...

A new discovery off the coast of Bahrain is estimated to contain at least 80 billion barrels of tight oil, the kingdom's biggest ever find, its oil minister said on Wednesday. Independent appraisals by U.S.-based oil consultants DeGolyer and MacNaughton and oilfield services company Halliburton had confirmed Bahrain's find of "highly significant quantities of oil in place ... with tight oil amounting to at least 80 billion barrels, and deep gas reserves in the region of 10-20 trillion cubic feet," Oil Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Khalifa al-Khalifa said. Russia's entire oil reserve is 80 billion barrels. Tight oil is a...

BALTIMORE (WJZ) — The cost of gas is up across the country, including in Maryland, and is inching toward the highest price in three years. Gas is going up about a penny every other day — 15 cents in the past month. “We’ll be paying the highest prices for this time of year since 2014,” said Christine Delise with AAA. Gas companies are changing over to a different summer blend. To do so, some refineries shut down, leading to the classic market principal of supply and demand. A tighter supply means they can demand more for your fuel. Demand is...

The billowing compute and data demands that spurred the oil and gas industry to be the largest commercial users of high-performance computing are now propelling the competitive sector to deploy the latest AI technologies. Beyond the requirement for accurate and speedy seismic and reservoir simulation, oil and gas operations face torrents of sensor, geolocation, weather, drilling and seismic data. Just the sensor data alone from one off-shore rig can accrue to hundreds of terabytes of data annually, but most of this remains unanalyzed, dark data. Why? Because there just isn't enough compute capacity to crunch it all. A collaboration between...

The International Energy Agency (IEA) said in a new forecast this week that growth in U.S. oil production will cover 80% of new global demand for oil in the next three years. U.S. oil production is expected to increase nearly 30% to 17 million barrels a day by 2023 with much of that growth coming from oil produced through fracking in West Texas. Republicans politicians and policymakers celebrated the news and sought to take credit for the development. Trump has sought to portray himself as a savior of the U.S. oil and gas industry, opening up federal lands to oil...

America’s anti-fracking enviros had a strange benefactor. While allegations of the Donald Trump campaign colluding with Russians to alter the presidential election outcome remain unproven at best, a clear money trail and U.S. intelligence reports demonstrate Russia’s active campaign of funding U.S. environmental groups. On March 1, U.S. House Science, Space, and Technology Committee’s chairman, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), released a report on “Russia’s Social Media Meddling in U.S. Energy Markets.” The report details Russia’s motives in interfering with U.S. energy markets, influencing domestic energy policy, and manipulation of Americans via social media propaganda. “This report reveals that Russian agents...

This has been a colder-than-usual winter in the Midwest and Northeast, so many Americans are facing high home heating and electric bills. In some areas, these bills can reach $1,000 a month. Liberals, of course, charge that Donald Trump is the culprit. An AP story last week screamed: "Trump Once Again Wants to Cut Energy Assistance to the Poor." Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders charged that if Trump has his way and eliminates the Low Income Heating Assistance Program, people might "freeze to death." But wait. Donald Trump is pro-American energy development. He isn't the one who is making energy bills...

Since Donald Trump's election, environmental zealots have mostly had a very rough two weeks — and Donald Trump has had nothing to do with any of it. Two developments they consider really bad (meaning good for the rest of us) far outweigh the single item they're celebrating. First, in Wyoming, just two days after the election, their "fracking is bad" Exhibit A in Pavillion, Wyoming was completely discredited. Second, in Texas this week, a huge oil discovery was reported — so big and unprecedented that the only commenter at the Associated Press's coverage of the story at the Washington Post...