Ever since Richard Nixon’s 1973 promise to attain energy independence, successive U.S. presidents all have pledged the same goal — even as foreign supplies composed a larger and larger share of the U.S. energy mix.
Now, almost 40 years later, a measure of independence is within reach. But as this booming town in northeastern Pennsylvania shows, the quest for independence involves both opportunities and trade-offs.
It may surprise many, but in less than a decade, the U.S. could pass its 1970s peak as an oil and natural gas producer. If that happens — and many analysts think it’s possible — the U.S. would edge past Saudi Arabia and Russia to become the world’s top energy producer.
That alone wouldn’t make the country completely energy independent. Mexico and Canada are likely to remain stable providers of oil to supplement growing U.S. production. And other factors will help, too, ranging from advances in battery technologies and alternative fuels to greater fuel economy in automobiles.
However, the biggest potential game changer for U.S. energy production is natural gas. Just a few years ago, terminals were being built at U.S. ports in anticipation of importing natural gas; today, there’s talk of exporting it.
Technological advances have allowed drillers to go down almost 7,000 feet, smashing through rock formations and drilling horizontally, freeing trapped oil and gas that long had been considered inaccessible.
“Shale gas, the biggest energy innovation since the start of the new century, has turned what was an imminent shortage in the United States into what may be a hundred-year supply,” Daniel Yergin, the world’s most prominent oil historian, wrote in his new book about energy security, “The Quest.”
Promise of shale gas
The promise of shale gas is present in many places that are being developed across the country, but it’s nowhere more visible than in northeastern Pennsylvania’s Bradford County, which is in the aptly named Endless Mountains region.Communities here sit atop the Marcellus Shale formation, which runs along southern New York state through western Pennsylvania into eastern Ohio and parts of Maryland and West Virginia.
Geologists think the Marcellus Shale formation contains the second-largest natural gas deposits in the world, behind only Iran’s South Pars-North Dome gas field in the Persian Gulf.
