Forbes: The Best Thing About Shale Gas
The shale-gas revolution has been, like all revolutions, a mixed blessing. It has unleashed a flood of cheap energy on the nation, but it’s also created a treadmill for drillers who must keep pouring capital into wells in a potentially hopeless attempt to show growing earnings from producing gas.
Retired BHP Billiton Chief Charles “Chip” Goodyear sketched out this bleak scenario this afternoon at the Yale Alumni in Energy Conference, an annual gathering of alumni active in all sides of the energy industry. Far from becoming a vast new source of baseload electricity fuel or even exports as liquified natural gas, a lot of the shale gas will essentially serve as a reserve in times of shortage, he said.
“We have a huge luxury we didn’t have before,” he said. “We know where the hydrocarbon is, and we know how much it costs to get out of the ground.”