With a single surface well, producers can now drill straight down nearly two miles, then turn 90 degrees and drill two miles horizontally in many directions. It’s a modern marvel to match the Wright Brothers’ airplane and Thomas Edison’s light bulb.
The result has been a revolution in American energy. Our potential for domestic production of oil and gas are, for the foreseeable future, limitless.
North Dakota is on the frontier of this revolution and its people are experiencing the effects firsthand. The state has gone from an estimated 150 million barrels of recoverable oil in 1995 to more than 24 billion today. That’s a 16,000 percent increase.
Other states are sharing in the boom from shale oil and gas revolution. The Marcellus shale is beginning to return opportunity to western Pennsylvania. The same has happened with the Eagle Ford shale in Texas. Even eastern Ohio will be producing large volumes of oil soon from the Utica shale.
The dramatic increase in supply has led to a precipitous drop in price. In 2008, natural gas cost on average $7.97 per trillion cubic feet. Today, the price has dropped by almost 70 percent to about $2.60.
More. . .