The Explosive Growth of Shale Gas

The growth momentum of the ‘sunshine’ Shale gas industry has been revving up.

From Bloomberg

Surging crude output in the Bakken shale formation is set to make North Dakota a bigger oil producer than OPEC member Ecuador.

The CHART OF THE DAY tracks North Dakota’s production, which has almost doubled in the past two years, as Ecuadorean output has stagnated.

North Dakota and neighboring Montana are home to the Bakken Formation, identified by the U.S. Geological Survey in 2008 as having as much as 4.3 billion barrels of recoverable oil. Companies extract the oil with hydraulic fracturing, a technique that shoots water, sand and chemicals into shale.

“There’s been an amazing jump in North Dakota output,” said Rick Mueller, a principal with ESAI Energy LLC in Wakefield, Massachusetts. “We are looking for output to be anywhere from 700,000 barrels to 1 million barrels a day within five years.”

North Dakota pumped a record 464,129 barrels a day in September, the most recent month with available data, according to the state government, up from 86,072 barrels 10 years earlier. The state is now the fourth-biggest producer in the U.S. after Texas, Alaska and California, according to the Energy Department.

Ecuador produced 485,000 barrels a day in September, according to a monthly Bloomberg News survey of oil companies, producers and analysts, near the top of its range for the past four years. It was OPEC’s smallest producer until Libya’s production was disrupted this year by the insurrection that toppled Muammar Qaddafi.

The momentous growth by Shale gas industry has largely been ignored by the mainstream obsessed by politically ordained ‘renewable energy’ or by peak oil theorists fixated with Malthusian dynamics

A good example can be seen from the Economist

EFFORTS to tackle climate change include heavy investment in renewable sources of electricity around the world. Solar power saw the biggest leap in 2010, with the installed base jumping 70% compared with 2009 to 40 gigawatts. Wind power also grew strongly, adding 24% of generating capacity. Yet the biggest source of renewable electricity, hydropower, and the smallest, geothermal, both only added 3% to capacity. Finding usable sources of either is becoming increasingly hard or costly. The region that saw the biggest growth in renewable energy projects was power-hungry Asia. Investment in renewables also saw the biggest leap since 2007, with $243 billion spent, a 30% increase over 2009.

Eventually the growth of the industry will likely reach a scale enough to incentivize a structural change or reconfiguration in the distribution of demand.