Natural Gas to the Rescue

Gasoline is approaching $4/gallon and the U.S. is finally moving to on-shore its energy production! Well, no, as in N-O-P-E. The Obama Administration has shut down wells in the Gulf of Mexico, Congress has refused to allow drilling in Alaska, coal is bad, nukes are beyond the pale. Let's just keep buying Middle East and Hugo Chavez oil, shall we? It's enough to make you think that our current energy "policy" was scripted by the sheiks! Fortunately, someone is moving to free up available energy with new technology.

The German magazine Der Spiegel reports on new natural gas drilling technology that allow gas to be recovered from deeper levels and smaller pockets than ever before. The new process is called "fracking" and it involves injecting a water/sand mixture into deep pockets to force the gas out and into collection pipes. While it is rapidly evolving all around the globe, the U.S. is leading the pack, with Pennsylvania and North Dakota in the vanguard. In fact, did you know that the U.S. is now the leading producer of natural gas in the world on the strength of this new technology? Probably not because the media finds it much interesting to extol the "virtues" of ethanol, which is nothing more than a thinly-disguised subsidy to corn-producing states that wrecks engines and lowers mileage. Fortunately, someone is doing the heavy lifting out of the media's eye and is really helping lift the U.S. out of its dependence on foreign energy. Now if we could just accelerate the process to an electric economy with the power produced from a variety of sources like small nuclear plants, hydro, clean coal, etc., we could let the folks in the Middle East literally go pound sand.

www.spiegel.de/international/business/0,1518,748573,00.html