Pages

October 1, 2012

Is This What Obama Means By Being More "Flexible"?


From Russia without love via the Business Insider:
Experts Believe Russia Is Bankrolling A Plan To End Shale Gas

The Kremlin is watching, European nations are rebelling, and some suspect Moscow is secretly bankrolling a campaign to derail the West's strategic plans.

It's not some Cold War movie; it's about the U.S. boom in natural gas drilling, and the political implications are enormous.

Like falling dominoes, the drilling process called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is shaking up world energy markets from Washington to Moscow to Beijing. Some predict what was once unthinkable: that the U.S. won't need to import natural gas in the near future, and that Russia could be the big loser.

"This is where everything is being turned on its head," said Fiona Hill, an expert on Russia at the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington. "Their days of dominating the European gas markets are gone."

Any nations that trade in energy could potentially gain or lose.

"The relative fortunes of the United States, Russia, and China — and their ability to exert influence in the world — are tied in no small measure to global gas developments," Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government concluded in a report this summer.

3 comments:

banned said...

I thought that fracking was well underway in the US with resulting reduced costs for homes and industry?
Here in England fracking is still facing a battle against the usual suspects but the public is waking up to two things 1) hugely inflated fuel bills as a direct result of "green" taxes and 2) that fracking provides a cheaper alternative to uncertain supplies of Russian gas.

sig94 said...

banned - locally we are still fighting for public opinion. In North Dakota the battle has been won and the state is booming.

Western Pennsylvania is also drilling (fracking?) like crazy. My SIL was offered a job there supervising some dozen sites or so but didn't want to relocate and spend four weeks out of six traveling.

HermitJim said...

Seems like the PTB have known about better ways of getting the needed energy, but have fought them off because of the profits involved.

I think we better do something quick, but that's just my opinion for what it's worth!