The Obama administration seems to have bought the mythos of abundant shale gas - a mythos that has completely shoved aside all discussions of peak oil. In fact, companies like Dow Chemical and Westlake Chemical have announced intentions to make major investments in new facilities over the next several years. In addition, firms that provide equipment for shale gas production have announced major investments in the U.S., including Vallourec’s $650 million plant for steel pipes in Ohio. By keeping domestic energy costs relatively low, this resource also supports energy intensive manufacturing in the United States. Of the major fossil fuels, natural gas is the cleanest and least carbon‐intensive for electric power generation. Provided these precautions are taken, the potential benefits to the U.S. Since the mid‐2000s … the discovery of new natural gas reserves, such as the Marcellus Shale, and the development of hydraulic fracturing techniques to extract natural gas from these reserves has led to rapidly growing domestic production and relatively low domestic prices for households and downstream industrial users. Appropriate care must to be taken to ensure that America’s natural resources are extracted in a safe and environmentally responsible manner with the safeguards in place to protect public health and safety. However, the Investing in America report endorses the “safe and environmentally responsible” extraction of natural gas. Until now, the Environmental Protection Agency has, generally, been moving slowly on the issue, with initial study results due out this year and a final report due in 2014. The tour will continue through California in coming weeks, culminating with a March for Climate Leadership in Oakland on February 7.Last week, the Obama administration gave what may be its first formal statement favoring hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, of natural gas, in a report called Investing in America: Building an Economy That Last.
The labor body is lobbying for more investment in geothermal power, which can generate clean energy around the clock, unlike solar power, and for power-storage projects that would make expanded adoption of renewable energy more feasible.
Not counting a considerable body of work by non-union contractors, over 1000 megawatts of renewable-power generation has been installed locally in recent years (roughly enough to replace one of the two defunct nuclear reactors at San Onofre). Micah Mitrosky, representing the local electrical workers' union, says progress is being made - in 2013, the most recent year for which statistics are available, union members logged 1.6 million hours working on renewable-energy projects, roughly a quarter of all hours worked that year. corporations who've set up shop in Mexico." "There may be a political fence" along the border, says Brao, "but we share the same air, the same watershed, and there's plenty of pollution flowing back across generated by U.S. It's not just Central California and its massive Monterey Shale gas and oil deposits that will be affected by mining operations, activist José Brao said - a massive liquefied natural gas storage and processing facility near Ensenada, Energia Costa Azul, was built to process up to one billion cubic feet of gas per day, much of it shipped through San Diego County via existing pipelines. As much as two million gallons of water is used daily for existing fracking operations within the state, despite ongoing severe drought conditions. Joy Williams of the Environmental Health Coalition said that up to 2000 local trips by trucks transporting equipment, water, and chemicals were involved in the drilling of a single well. Despite the rush to expand fracking wells across the country, Braun and others say it's an inefficient process, requiring the equivalent of a barrel of oil's worth of energy to extract five barrels from the ground.
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