Energy Industry Supporting 3.5 million Jobs by 2035

With the current unemployment rate at a low of 7.9%, who wouldn't be excited to hear that any one industry could potentially support 3.5 million jobs by 2035? In our current economic position, statistics like that sound extremely appealing.

According to API President and CEO Jack Gerard, development of the United States' unconventional oil and gas resources could create 2 million new jobs over the next two decades. The energy industry could potentially be the main component in getting our nation back to where it was economically ten years ago. According to another article on America's Natural Gas Alliance, shale gas alone is expected to add 1 million new jobs not only in the field but also in related industries. This news sounds incredible, and I believe is completely attainable if and only if we continue hydraulic fracturing operations throughout America.

A major part of unconventional oil and gas operations is shale gas drilling. When drilling into shale, very little oil and gas will be produced unless the well is hydraulically fractured, "fracced." To make each of the wells profitable when they begin to produce, they must be fracced.  Knowing this, it is obvious that the industry will only be profitable and create new jobs if these wells are economically profitable once drilled.

What I am trying to get at in this post is that America needs hydraulic fracturing until there is a new technology developed to get the oil and gas out of the shale. If we slow down or discontinue fraccing operations, as a nation, we will not be able to produce nearly as much domestic oil and gas and will continue relying on other countries more and more.

-Aubrey Bagley

Separating Facts From Fiction

According to the American Time Use Survey Summary taken by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that on average, a person 15 years or older spends about 2.8 hrs a day watching the television. Watching television is generally where many people will get all of their information on what is going on in the world that day. One of the major topics in the news regarding the oil & gas industry is about hydraulic fracturing of shale. Much of what you see in the media will be skewed one way or another depending on who is creating the piece. Because of this, the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin conducted a study on the effects hydraulic fracturing has to clear up a few of the statements reporters have made.

They titled this study Separating Fact From Fiction in Shale Gas Development. A team of interdisciplinary experts studied shale formations from New York and Pennsylvania down to west Texas. Three critical areas were studied including: environmental and health effects, public perceptions, and state and federal regulations. 

First looking at the environmental and health effects, there are concerns about hydraulic fracturing contaminating ground water as well as methane gas seeping into aquifers. According to this study, researchers found that the groundwater contamination from hydraulic fracturing is not unique to hydraulic fracturing and occurs in other conventional oil and gas operations. Along with that, methane that was found in water wells most likely did not occur from hydraulic fracturing, rather, it was there before any drilling had taken place. 

Secondly, after looking at the public perceptions from the media coverage, it showed that in newspapers, online journals, the television and other sources about two thirds of all the media regarding hydraulic fracturing is negative. Not only was most of it negative, but only about one in four containing scientific evidence supporting their claims. 

Lastly, many of the state oil and gas regulations were written much before the discovery of shale gas and do not contain many particular regulations regarding it. There are only a few states that have revised the regulations to regulate certain areas of hydraulic fracturing including but not limited to: disclosure of hydraulic fracturing chemicals, proper casing of wells to prevent aquifer contamination, as well as management of waste water. The report also stated that rather than making more regulations on hydraulic fracturing, the regulations should be focused towards spill prevention. There is a greater health and environmental risk that can occur on a surface spill rather than subsurface during the actual hydraulic fracturing. 

This should be able to give another view to what the media will feed the public the majority of the time and help show that it is important to look beyond what is said on the television and to dig deep into the cold hard facts to help eliminate the fiction.

-Aubrey Bagley