Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
historic highs by June 2008. In one year, Americans might collectively
be spending forty billion dollars on natural gas; the next, their total bill
could easily come to i ve times that.
But then something happened that surprised most market watch-
ers: at er prices fell sharply through late 2009—a development people
anticipated, given the deep recession that had hit the country—they
never recovered. Analysts repeatedly revised their projections down-
ward. First they predicted i ve dollar natural gas; then, by 2010, they
were forecasting prices of four dollars for a thousand cubic feet. By late
2011, even those projections seemed dated, with natural gas below three
dollars an apparent reality. Something fundamental had changed.
Natural gas production in the United States was booming. 3 Flat for
about a decade through 2006, output suddenly took of in 2007, ris-
ing 14 percent by 2010. h e United States hadn't witnessed growth
like that since the 1960s, which marked the tail end of a twenty-year
boom following World War II sparked by the introduction of inexpen-
sive long-distance natural gas pipelines. And this didn't seem like a l ash
in the pan: by early 2012, U.S. government analysts were projecting
steady increases in natural gas production, and relatively low prices,
for decades to come. 4
Most of the U.S. natural gas industry had evolved pret y much as
expected. 5 Traditional onshore production from simple vertical wells
had been in decline for decades, and of shore output peaked around
the turn of the century. Production from coalbed methane, in which
drillers extracted natural gas from seams in underground coal deposits,
remained small and pret y much l at. Something called tight gas—nat-
ural gas trapped in dense formations that made it dii cult for the gas
to l ow—had been on the rise a few years back, but production leveled
of . h ere was only one source that could explain what was happening:
natural gas from shale.
h e breakthrough had come about ten years earlier. It combined two
well-worn techniques. h e i rst was horizontal drilling, which allowed
developers to drill down before turning ninety degrees and then drilling
a mile or more sideways. h at was particularly valuable for get ing at
shale gas, which is found deep underground in thin layers; by drilling
horizontally, a well could be placed through a big slice of gas. Horizontal
 
 
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