If you support a higher standard of living for Vermonters, whether it comes from higher incomes or lower prices, it’s hard to oppose lower energy prices. Whether we use it or not, fracked gas and fracked oil is a big reason Vermont families are saving up to $3,000 per year on their energy costs and paying $2.20 for a gallon of gas and not $4.00. Today, there is almost as much electricity generated from burning natural gas as from oil.Ī vocal group of Vermonters is opposed to “fracked gas” in Vermont’s only natural gas pipeline and presumably, to “fracked oil” that we are putting into our cars. Six years ago, coal-fired generators produced more than twice as much electricity as power plants that used natural gas as their fuel source. This has caused more people to switch to natural gas to heat their homes and more importantly, electric utilities to shut down coal-fired power plants. The dramatic increase in oil and natural gas has significantly reduced energy prices. That has significantly increased the United States production and in the process, it has made many farmers very wealthy. Regions of the United States that were never thought to have significant amounts of recoverable natural gas, places like North Dakota and Pennsylvania are now centers of natural gas production. That four million barrels increase is more than the total production of Iran, Iraq, Mexico, Kuwait, Venezuela or Nigeria. Those technologies have increased the United States oil production from five million barrels per day in 2008 to more than nine million barrels today. So far, most of the new technologies have been used in the United States oil and gas fields and that’s important, given that the United States today, is the world’s largest oil producer responsible for 20 per cent more petroleum than Saudi Arabia, the world’s second-largest producer, 50 per cent more than Russia and three times as much as China or Canada, the fourth and fifth largest producers in the world.įracking and horizontal drilling technologies were not developed by Exxon, British Petroleum or the major oil companies but by small, independent and innovative oil entrepreneurs. To put those numbers into perspective, Americans currently use about seven billion barrels of oil each year and total annual world consumption is about 35 billion barrels, so this new technology is like discovering oil wells that will satisfy world demand for a decade. There’s another 300 billion barrels available worldwide. The EIA estimates that about 78 billion barrels of this previously unavailable oil can now be pumped out of the ground and that’s just in the United States alone. That oil was thought to be permanently locked up in rock formations. The former, better known as “fracking” or fracturing enables oil producers to extract literarily billions more barrels of oil out of the ground than was available just a decade ago. This rapid decline in energy prices is in large part because of two technological changes in the oil and natural gas industry. Combined, those renewable make up only five per cent of all the electricity produced in the United States, and less than two percent of all the energy used in the nation for transportation, electricity, heating and all other uses.
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