Free Republic

Energy Revolution: America's natural gas boom threatens Russia's economic strategy, an expert says, leaving it with few alternatives to rescue its economy while threatening to shatter its energy stranglehold on Europe. Russia's abundance of energy resources has long allowed it to use energy both as a foreign policy weapon and as the bedrock of the Russian economy. Whenever energy prices rose, Russia benefited and its neighbors often felt the restraining leash of dependence on Russian energy, particularly natural gas. Government-controlled energy giant Gazprom was in such a strong position it could demand decade-long contracts and link the price of gas...

Energy: A new study shows that little methane, a strong greenhouse gas that occurs naturally in ground water, is released into the atmosphere during hydraulic fracturing. So it must be OK to frack now. In the first "Gasland" movie, environmental activist Josh Fox trumpeted flaming water taps in a Colorado town as evidence of fracking-induced water contamination. In fact, the areas in question had reported naturally occurring methane in their water for decades. Whether naturally occurring or not, environmentalists claim that fracking would release huge amounts of what they consider the most potent heat-trapping greenhouse gas, far outweighing the value...

Energy Policy: The Environmental Protection Agency declines to have outside experts review its study claiming water contamination from fracking in Wyoming. Why confuse an analysis based on ideology with the facts? As we noted in December 2011, the Environmental Protection Agency, under pressure from environmental groups, tried to manufacture a crisis in which hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, was said to have contaminated test wells in Pavillion, Wyo. Those claims and others made in the six-decade history of the technology's use have repeatedly proved groundless. In 2011, the EPA released the non-peer reviewed report on Pavillion in which the agency publicly...

Energy: After more than five years of a fracking moratorium, a leading energy company walks away from its leases, leaving New York, its natural gas riches — and the jobs and wealth they could generate — unrealized. In 2000, people from Chesapeake Energy began arriving in Broome County, New York, a few miles north of the Pennsylvania border. Broome had seen better economic days but was lucky to be sitting right atop the natural gas-rich Marcellus Shale formation, which stretches through much of the Northeast. Over the next few years, Chesapeake was able to snap up drilling rights to some...

Energy: A Saudi prince has warned that his oil-reliant nation is under threat because of fracking technology being developed in the U.S. and spreading around the world. OPEC is now caught between Riyadh and a hard place. Indicative of the panic rippling through the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries over the U.S.-led fracking boom, billionaire Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal says his Gulf Arab kingdom needs to reduce its reliance on crude oil and diversify its revenues, lest the era of gold-plated toilets come to an end. In an open letter to his country's oil minister Ali al-Naimi and other...

Energy: The former Golden State is floating in debt, even as it sits on two-thirds of America's shale oil reserves locked in a formation four times the size of the one that sparked North Dakota's economic boom. North Dakota is now the largest oil producer in the country after Texas with a monthly oil output of about 20 million barrels. North Dakota's oil boom accounts for 11% of U.S. oil production, and it is the impetus behind the state's $3.8 billion surplus and an unemployment rate of just 3.2%, the lowest in the nation. California is not running a surplus,...

Energy: At a plant that makes natural-gas-powered trucks, the president proposes still more alternative-energy subsidies. The privately developed technology that lowered the price of natural gas can lower gasoline prices too. It was a tad surreal to see President Obama, champion of green energy and unions, visiting a foreign-owned manufacturer of natural gas-powered trucks in a right-to-work state. But there he was Wednesday, at the Daimler Trucks North America truck factory in Mount Holly, N.C., touting vehicles powered by a fossil fuel produced by drilling. The president, who recently touted pond scum as an energy source of the future, embraced...

Energy: The top White House energy aide says new regulations gripping the technology responsible for unlocking America's vast oil and gas reserves will be ready by year's end. Team Obama's war on fossil fuels continues. One more reason not to re-elect President Obama to a second term was provided last Friday, when Heather Zichal, the top White House energy aide, told reporters that she expects the Interior Department rules regulating hydraulic fracturing, dubbed fracking, to be completed by year's end. Why are federal rules necessary since fracking has been successfully regulated at the state level for decades without a single...

Carbon emissions in the U.S. have hit a 20-year low due to a supposedly environmentally unfriendly drilling technique that has created an abundance of cheap natural gas. The free market, it seems, does it better than the EPA. Environmentalists find themselves between shale rock and a hard place after a little noticed technical report documented how the natural gas boom caused by the use of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, has actually helped the environment in a major way while also creating jobs and economic growth. In the report, the U.S. Energy Information Agency, a part of the Energy Department, said...

Carbon emissions in the U.S. have hit a 20-year low due to a supposedly environmentally unfriendly drilling technique that has created an abundance of cheap natural gas. The free market, it seems, does it better than the EPA. Environmentalists find themselves between shale rock and a hard place after a little noticed technical report documented how the natural gas boom caused by the use of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, has actually helped the environment in a major way while also creating jobs and economic growth. In the report, the U.S. Energy Information Agency, a part of the Energy Department, said...

Energy: As the U.S. changes the balance of power by exporting some of its abundant natural gas resources, a Hollywood propaganda film debuts claiming the technology making it possible will poison America's small towns. 'Promised Land," a film that does nothing to alter Hollywood's stereotype of businessmen, particularly energy industry executives, as greedy plunderers of the planet, opens this week in selected theatres. The anti-fracking film is based on a not-true story about well contamination in a small Pennsylvania town with a healthy dose of junk science. As documentary filmmaker Phelim McAleer, who is working on his own documentary, "FrackNation",...