It’s Frack, Baby, Frack, as Conventional Gas Drilling Declines

To deliver significant cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, a new proposal from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency foresees a growing role for natural gas.  But will there be enough of it at affordable prices?

The U.S. Energy Information Administration and industry sources say there’s plenty that can be extracted at a reasonable price.  But some experts question those estimates or say that, at least, the nation shouldn’t bank on them.  Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, coupled with horizontal drilling, has unlocked large gas deposits in shale rock, which had been long recognized but weren’t profitable to extract until about a decade ago.  Over the past five years, with improvements in fracking, shale gas production has soared.  At the same time, however, production from all other sources—such as conventional gas fields on land and offshore as well as so-called tight gas and coal-bed methane—has been declining at a rate of about 5 percent per year.

It’s Frack, Baby, Frack, as Conventional Gas Drilling Declines