Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
After years of losing manufacturing jobs, communities near productive shale plays
are using incentives—and their proximity to natural gas supplies—to lure foreign
investments.
In 2012, for example, Orascom Construction Industries, based in Cairo, Egypt,
and one of the world's biggest fertilizer manufacturers, announced it would build a
$1.4 billion plant in Wever, Iowa. The company chose this site over one in Illinois
because part of its investment will be funded by a tax-exempt bond that provides
$100 million in tax relief. The plant, Orascom announced, will be “the first world-
scale, natural gas-based fertilizer plant built in the United States in nearly 25
years.”
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A number of states that sit atop the Marcellus Shale—Ohio, West Virginia, and
Pennsylvania—were recently engaged in a head-to-head competition to woo Royal
Dutch Shell, the energy firm based in London and The Hague. The company ulti-
mately decided to build a $2 billion petrochemical plant northwest of Pittsburgh.
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Currently the 12 member nations of OPEC produce over 40 percent of the world's
oil, which gives the group tremendous control over the price of crude oil, the
through hydrofracking shale, OPEC's influence on prices at the pump will weaken.
Indeed, a 2012 report by the National Intelligence Council (NIC), an adviser to
the CIA, found that the success of American shale oil and gas exploration could
soon cause a fundamental shift in the global energy market. The NIC estimates that
US oil production could expand to 15 million barrels a day, more than double the
current rate. This would reduce domestic oil prices, increase US economic activity
by 2 percent, add 3 million jobs, and could turn the United States into a major oil
States now has sufficient natural gas supplies to make it a major exporter. “In a tec-
tonic shift, energy independence is not unrealistic for the US in as short a period as
10-20 years,” the NIC found.
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