ENERGY INDEPENDENCE ON THE HORIZON - The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future - page 52

intense that “even the U.S. military and NATO may lack sui cient fuel
to meet its needs.” h e rhetoric was hyperbolic, but its basic story of
inevitable decline was entirely mainstream.
Yet within less than a year at er he posted the let er the conven-
tional wisdom changed entirely. Oil watchers were heralding a stun-
ning boom in U.S. production. In North Dakota and Texas, producers
were drilling down and then sideways to extract oil, using the same
techniques that have been applied to natural gas. Of shore production
was booming despite the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the i rst major
U.S. oil spill since the Exxon Valdez . North of the U.S.-Canada border,
in the Alberta oil sands, developers were extracting tarlike bitumen in
massive mines and by heating deposits buried deep beneath the earth,
producing millions of barrels a day of oil in the process and fueling
excitement about potential gains further south.
h is time around, it seemed, the technologies that were needed to
fuel resurgence in American oil were i nally ready for prime time. Adam
Sieminski, a sober analyst who would soon leave Deutsche Bank to
join the White House staf , captured the mood in an interview with
Bloomberg : “For 40 years, only politicians and the occasional author in
Popular Mechanics magazine talked about achieving energy indepen-
dence. Now it doesn't seem such an outlandish idea. ” 2 Jonas, newer to
the oil game but already deep in it, seems sold too. Technology has
come to the rescue, he explains: “h

ere will be abundant fossil fuel.”

T his sort of optimism is characteristic of oilmen and those like

Howard Jonas who aspire to join their ranks. h e wild and unpre-
dictable nature of their business would crush most anyone who wasn't.
Promising prospects can turn out to be worthless, ot en taking their
boosters down with them. As recently as 2002, drillers exploring for
new petroleum in the United States found themselves striking out more
ot en than they hit pay dirt. 3 And that state of af airs was considered
enormous progress: a decade before, the rule had been roughly three
failures for every success. Worse, even if prospectors found oil, there
was no guarantee they'd be able to make money producing it. Prices
could tumble precipitously just as easily as they could skyrocket, merci-
lessly wiping out producers and their dreams of fortune.