Environmental Engineering Reference
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they identii ed spanned the country, from Texas and North Dakota to
newer prospects such as Delaware, Wyoming, Colorado, and California.
In 2012 alone, U.S. production rose by eight hundred thousand bar-
rels a day, primarily on the back of tight oil development, bringing the
country's total daily production up to 6.4 million barrels.
h ese gains are being supplemented by so-called natural gas liquids
(we i rst encountered these, also known as NGLs, in the previous chap-
ter) that are produced alongside shale gas and have the potential to
partly displace oil: ethane can replace naphtha, a rei ned oil product,
in chemicals plants, while propane and butane can replace some oil
in petroleum rei neries. Analysts debate how interchangeable NGLs
really are with oil, but regardless, their volumes are dii cult to ignore:
between 2005 and 2010, NGL production rose by more than half a
million barrels a day, a i gure that some expect to grow by as much as
another million barrels a day within the next decade.
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But tight oil and fracking are far from the whole story. Only a few
years ago, had you asked an oil analyst the future of American oil was,
odds are that tight oil would have been far from the top of the list.
h ere's a good chance that the analyst would have told you to look at
the rigs working in the deep water of the U.S. Gulf of Mexico instead.
T
his is not a decision that I've made lightly.” Barack Obama wasn't
“
overstating his point. Standing in front of a new F-18 i ghter jet
christened the “Green Hornet” (it could run on a mix of petroleum-based
jet fuel and biofuels), he had some decidedly ungreen news to share. “Today
we're announcing the expansion of of shore oil and gas exploration,” he
explained, ticking of frontiers from the Gulf of Mexico to Alaska that
would be opened for business. At er decades of pitched bat les between
the right and the let over the future of of shore drilling, the president had
decided to break free. His allies were not impressed. Jacqueline Savitz, a
senior campaign director at the environmental group Oceana, captured
the sentiment: “We're appalled that the president is unleashing a wholesale
assault on the oceans,” she fumed.
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h e White House insisted of shore
drilling was now safe. Environmental groups weren't so sure.
Less than a month later, the president's plans were in tat ers. On
April 20, 2010, i t y miles of the coast of Louisiana, an explosion at
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