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International News Title: Farewell to OPEC Maybe the fly on the wall knows, because nothing was leaked to the New York Times or Washington Post, but one of the topics that may have come up in meetings between American and Saudi officials during President Trump’s historic visit is the energy revolution unleashed by President Trump that is sure to make the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries an energy relic. Through regulation repeal and executive orders and the changing of the guard at the Environmental Protection Energy, Trump has made fossil fuels great again with expanded shale oil and natural gas production for both domestic consumption and export leading the way. And thanks to the completion of the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, North American energy independence is soon to become reality. As Investor’s Business Daily editorialized in 2013, the Saudis, among other OPEC members, have been freaking out about fracking, warning that it spelled doom for the Arab oil cartel: In an open letter to his country's oil minister Ali al-Naimi and other government heads, published on Sunday via his Twitter account, Prince Alwaleed said demand for oil from OPEC member states was "in continuous decline" as a result of the technology that has unleashed vast deposits of oil and natural gas worldwide. So concerned were OPEC ministers that they financed a Hollywood flick, Promised Land starring Matt Damon, which incorporated every falsehood about the safety of fracking and was intended to fuel its death by regulation: The anti-fracking film is based on a not-true story about well contamination in a small Pennsylvania town with a healthy dose of junk science. The only problem, notes McAleer, is the claims were debunked by both the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection and the Environmental Protection Agency, both of which found no evidence of contamination. But why spoil a good story with the facts? … It should not surprise that major funding for the film, according to the Heritage Foundation's Lachlan Markey, comes from Image Media Abu Dhabi, a subsidiary of Abu Dhabi Media. "A spokesperson with DDA Public Relations, which runs PR for Participant Media, the company that developed the film fund backing "Promised Land", confirmed that AD Media is a financier. The company is wholly owned by the government of the UAE," Mackey writes. The film depends on junk science for its story line. The mixture used to fracture shale is in fact a benign blend of 90% water, 9.5% sand and 0.5% chemicals such as the sodium chloride of table salt and the citric acid of the orange juice you had for breakfast. Shale formations in which fracking is employed are thousands of feet deep. Drinking water aquifers are generally only 100 feet deep. There is a lot of solid rock between them. OPEC’s greatest fears are being realized as fears about fracking vanish under the glare of reality. As the Energy Information Administration reports, OPEC is being hit hard as American shale production helps dry up OPEC’s coffers: Fracking is putting downward pressure on oil prices, reducing the revenues of both OPEC and Russia. Trump is clearly not colluding with Russia on oil prices, a nation which Sen. John McCain once described as “a gas station masquerading as a country.” As the American Interest notes: Those lost export revenues are why OPEC, along with a group of 11 other petrostate producers (including Russia), have agreed at last to reduce their collective output in an attempt to rebalance the market. American shale is now the elephant in the room. The Saudis may have concluded a massive arms deal with the United States to counter the Iranian threat, but thanks to U.S. energy resurgence they will have to dig deeper to pay for it. Poster Comment: I've posted on this before but the panic from OPEC has become quite palpable. They seem to know the jig is up. Another piece on a new fracking technique that won't use lots of water or chemicals but will fracture shale with just a microwave emitter lowered to the bottom of the wells: AmericanThinker: New technology better than fracking could vastly expand oil reserves Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest
#1. To: Tooconservative (#0)
well it couldn't happen to a nicer group of potentates and all round bastards
I have to laugh when I think about how the Saudis tried hard to destroy the U.S. shale/fracking market. They turned the spigots wide and pumped cheap oil until it hurt. They really depleted their national monetary reserves in a serious way. Supposedly, they're down to 3-4 years of reserves in the Kingdom. IOW, they spent about half of all their liquid assets to try to destroy American fracking. And that is after they reduced their (very generous) welfare program for the entire Saudi population (heads of household were still making over $40K about 5 years ago). These reductions in Saudi public benefits are already causing some domestic unrest. Just imagine how much more this is hitting Russia and other oil economies. The future is not bright for these "gas station countries" (to use McCain's phrase). And if the Texas and NoDak and Canadian shale fields aren't bad enough for the Saudis, the mother lode of shale oil is all along on our west coast, virtually untouched. I predict we won't have to suffer through any more of those "Peak Oil, we're doomed in five years!" articles that we put up with for years.
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