By Joe Romm on Jun 26, 2011 at 11:21 am
The lead story in the New York Times today is a detailed bubble bursting of the much vaunted boom in unconventional natural gas.
Natural gas companies have been placing enormous bets on the wells they are drilling, saying they will deliver big profits and provide a vast new source of energy for the United States..
But the gas may not be as easy and cheap to extract from shale formations deep underground as the companies are saying, according to hundreds of industry e-mails and internal documents and an analysis of data from thousands of wells
The NYT has gained access to some amazing, must-read e-mails that “suggest a view that is in stark contrast to more bullish public comments made by the industry, in much the same way that insiders have raised doubts about previous financial bubbles.”
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The NYT has gained access to some amazing, must-read e-mails that “suggest a view that is in stark contrast to more bullish public comments made by the industry, in much the same way that insiders have raised doubts about previous financial bubbles.”
[...]
“The word in the world of independents is that the shale plays are just giant Ponzi schemes and the economics just do not work,” an analyst from IHS Drilling Data, an energy research company, wrote in an e-mail on Aug. 28, 2009.
[...]
The article raises three serious concerns about the new gas boom:
Are most wells going to deplete much faster than people expect?
Will the price of natural gas have to be much higher than people thought to make the economics work?
Will this all mean more fracking — with all of the potentially dangerous side effects, including leakage of methane, which boosts the lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions of shale gas?
[...] [See this article for a fuller discussion]
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