Good News To Know

In the recent "debates." the purported president claimed, to the contrary of his economic policy, that oil production in the United States was dramatically up!  It is true! The lie was that he caused it.

If you can crush an industry, why not claim to be the cause of its resilience?  This is, of course, more evidence of a pathological liar, a sociopath, so if you know anyone who stands with Obama, best recall you can tell people by their friends.

The inability to stop fracking in two or three states, mostly, has resulted in 2012 being the highest recorded extraction of good-ole carbon fuels. Yes. The record.  Below are some notes from Stansbury's letter to put the spike in perspective. Private industry has, once again, slipped around the tedious Big Brother.

I recommend voting to reduce the war on energy so other states, like NY, can join in the windfall.  The later NY waits, the less will be the windfall.  Of course, Democrats do not need revenue from oil, they place taxes on pizza.

All over the world, nations will be resorting to fracking, so the energy crisis is over; the good thing is natural gas will begin to take the place of oil.  This does reduce emissions.

So

 Oil hit a three-month low today at a little more than $88 a barrel. West Texas Intermediate crude – the U.S. benchmark price – has fallen from $108 a barrel in March… a 19% drop.
The reasons for the decline are twofold – a global economic slowdown and the huge amount of domestic oil production coming online from unconventional shale plays. We'll discuss the latter issue today. 

 We've highlighted North Dakota's Bakken shale region several times recently. It's one of the largest shale plays in the U.S… Its production will soon surpass the Arab nation of Qatar. At 770,000 barrels a day, Qatar is the world's largest supplier of liquefied natural gas (LNG) and a major oil exporter as a member of OPEC. And the Bakken is only one of the massive shale plays that will contribute billions of barrels of new production (more on those in a bit).
Thanks to new technologies like horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (fracking), exploration companies can now access resource deposits that were previously uneconomical. And it's leading to a huge glut in domestic energy supply. Consider the latest numbers from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)… 

 DOE reports domestic fossil-fuel production will reach an all-time high in 2012. At the end of this year, the U.S. will have produced more than 61 quadrillion British thermal units – the energy equivalent of burning 61,000,000,000,000,000 wooden matchsticks – of coal, oil, and natural gas. This meets 83.3% of total annual U.S. energy consumption needs. Five years ago, domestic sources only amounted to 70.5% of total annual consumption. The last time domestic energy production was as high a percentage of consumption was 1990. 

 Over the last four years, domestic natural gas production has increased 20.5%. Domestic oil production is up 24%. The following chart compares 2012 U.S. oil inventories to their 10-year and 28-year historical averages. Current levels are almost off the chart.

 And exploration companies are still finding massive new deposits. Last week, for example, we mentioned Continental Resources' discovery of a new shale oil play called the South-Central Oklahoma Oil Province (SCOOP). Continental is already the No. 1 producer and landowner in the Bakken. And it believes the SCOOP could yield 1.8 billion barrels in the coming decades. 

 Now, two new reports have surfaced regarding the Marcellus shale gas deposit…
The Marcellus shale lies beneath parts of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia. The U.S. Energy Information Administration's (EIA) most recent estimates had pegged Marcellus' gas reserves at 141 trillion cubic feet.
But the Associated Press reports industry analysts believe this number is "grossly understated." A Standard & Poor's report says the Marcellus may contain "almost half the proven natural gas reserves in the U.S." And a report from analysts at ITG Investment Research says the EIA's estimates don't correspond to actual well production. The firm estimates the Marcellus holds 330 trillion cubic feet of gas. That's more than double the reserves of the next-largest U.S. field, the Eagle Ford in southern Texas. 

 It's not just the size of the U.S. shale oil and gas revolution that is amazing… it's also the speed of production. 

The Wall Street Journal reports the U.S. will be in a virtual tie with Saudi Arabia as the world's largest oil producer by the end of next year. In 2012, U.S. oil production rose 7% to an average of 10.9 million barrels per day. It's the fourth-straight year of increases and the biggest one-year gain since 1951.

Saudi Arabia's daily oil output is 11.6 million barrels. Analysts expect Saudi production to remain flat through 2017… but U.S. production continues to surge at astounding rates. Citibank predicts the U.S. will produce 13 million to 15 million barrels per day by the end of the decade.

So, I am looking forward to $2.00 gas in the mid term!  (Then, again, BIg Brother will add more taxes) Natural gas will eventually creep up from its very low price, now, as we start exporting it and have a new market to compete for product.