“THE BARBARIANS ARE AT THE DOOR” - The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future - page 27

gas industry, from hoteliers who rent rooms to drillers to retailers who
sell them their boots. Counting such jobs is particularly controversial.
Some undoubtedly are new—there are hotels opening up where none
existed before—but some surely would exist without fracking, even if
people remained unemployed. (People who don't have jobs need to
eat and occasionally buy shoes too.) In any case, when the IHS people
added jobs of this kind into the mix, they came out with a staggering
number: shale gas had already added six hundred thousand jobs to the
economy by 2010. A month later, President Barack Obama cited that
i gure in his State of the Union address. h e number, IHS estimated,
could grow to more than a million by the end of the decade. 15
h e analysts also i gured that, whatever shale gas did for jobs, devel-
opment would add to American wealth. h is was far less controversial
than the estimates about jobs. Finding gold underground makes people
rich, and so does i nding natural gas. h e trick is to take into account
the cost of extracting the resource: lit le money can be made drawing
natural gas out of the ground unless the gas can be sold for more than
it costs to produce. Factoring this into their estimates, the IHS analysts
came out with a big number: by 2020, shale gas could add $150 billion
to U.S. GDP, about 1 percent of the U.S. economy, which totals about
$15 trillion.
For shale gas enthusiasts, though, this was far from the end of the
story. Americans wouldn't just make money extracting natural gas; they'd
also proi t from using it. Fit y miles east of Carrollton, where I visited
the Chesapeake drill site, Shell had announced plans to build an ethane
cracker. Shale gas is a mix of chemicals. h e most abundant one, meth-
ane, is the bulk of what gets burned in power plants and in stoves and
heaters at home. But natural gas comes up with a host of slightly heavier
molecules, known collectively as natural gas liquids (NGLs); ethane, pro-
pane, and butane are the most common. Ethane is particularly useful to
petrochemical producers. h ey send it through multibillion-dollar plants
called crackers to make a chemical called ethylene, a core building block
for everything from plastic bowls to l eece sweaters to car doors. h e only
other way to make ethylene—the method that Europeans and Asians
depend on—is to use naphtha, which is produced when oil is processed
in a petroleum rei nery. With oil prices far exceeding those for natural