THE shale-gas revolution in America has been as sudden and startling as a supertanker performing a handbrake turn. A country that once fretted about its dependence on Middle Eastern fossil fuels is now on the verge of self-sufficiency in natural gas. And the news keeps getting better. This week the International Energy Agency (IEA) predicted that the United States would become the world’s largest oil producer by 2020, outstripping Saudi Arabia and Russia (see article).
Why has this happened? Price signals work. Oil has been costly for more than a decade. This has spurred prospectors to look harder for unconventional fuels: oil and gas that lie deep under the sea, buried in shale beds or stuck in Canada’s vast oil sands (see article). They have developed whizzy technology to extract these hydrocarbons, with such success that North America now has a gas glut.
See full Article: http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21566663-good-thingbut-it-would-be-better-if-energy-was-priced-correctly-united-states-americas
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