At the Frontlines of the Global Transition
New Yorkers, if you want to know, think pretty highly about their city these days. And why not? From Battery Park, at the foot of Manhattan, to the far reaches of Queens, the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Staten Island new residents are arriving at the rate of 5,000 people a month. New jobs are being generated at the same clip. Unemployment is going down, as is violent crime, which has dropped nearly 80 percent in the …
Thomas Jefferson once said, “The Ohio is the most beautiful river on earth. Its current gentle, waters clear, and bosom smooth and unbroken by rocks and rapids, a single instance only excepted.” Downriver from Louisville, Kentucky, where the 1,000-mile long Ohio River reaches its widest points, and the mirroring waters slip by miles of unbroken hardwood forests, it’s possible to witness some of the very same beauty that inspired Jefferson. The Ohio is much in my …
Starting in 1989, a group of wildcatters raced across a 12-county stretch of northern Michigan to drill natural gas wells, and build all the roads, pipelines, pumping stations, and processing facilities to develop the region’s Antrim shale, the first shale gas play tapped in the U.S. For most of that time, until Wyoming’s coalbed-methane reserve development really got rolling in the late-1990s, northern Michigan was the most intensively drilled region of the continent. More than …
I read with interest the interviews with Bill McKibben and Amory Lovins that Yale Environment 360 posted today and in February. Good stuff. Perplexing and nerve-wracking all at the same time. Amory’s optimism about the prospects for clean energy, in its consistency over the last 30 years, reminds me of Lester Brown’s equally long-term pessimism about the world’s capacity to feed itself. Both have the technical details in place to make plausible cases but the …
The story of American energy used to be we use too much. There’s not enough. And a technical breakthrough in clean alternatives will save us. How 20th century. The new narrative – really, it’s true — of American energy is this: We’re using less. A national boom in oil and gas production, engulfing 12 states from California to Pennsylvania and North Dakota to Texas, is showing we have much more than we thought. And the …
SARDIS, Ohio — Frank Ellis, who is a 51-year-old electrician from this Ohio River Valley town, spent much of his time since high school working upriver at the PPG plant in Natrium, West Virginia. He owns 140 acres and the rights to the oil and gas below them. Denny Cowley (in pix below) is a 55-year-old sheet metal worker who was raised on a dairy farm near Canton, Ohio, and 16 years ago bought a …
Photo © Heather Rousseau/Circle of Blue WELLSVILLE, OHIO – A torrent of investment in mineral leases, manufacturing plants, pipeline constructiion, and drilling platforms signals what business executives and state energy officials say is the most significant surge in oil and gas development in Ohio in decades. But the development of the Marcellus and Utica shales, two hydrocarbon-rich rock layers that lie beneath much of eastern Ohio, also is producing fresh public concerns about the consequences …
It’s been generations since an industrial development as powerful and as widespread as the new oil and gas energy boom has swept across the United States. The risks — drinking water infiltration, wastewater disposal, oil well explosions, wildlife deaths, and earthquakes — are steadily emerging. The question for federal and state regulatory agencies, already under seige from diminished budgets and lawmakers intent on weakening oversight, is how quickly inspection agencies will respond to public threats. …
This week, Ohio counted over 130 drilling permits that it had approved since last summer to a select group of big energy companies to drill for oil and gas in counties along the upper Ohio River. The state says 45 wells, aimed at the oil- and gas-saturated Utica shale, have already been drilled. River towns that have been growing old and shedding their talented young people for two generations are suddenly awake with jobs and …
Little by little America seems to be catching on to the unexpected oil and natural gas production boom engulfing the United States. The 40-year catechism of U.S. energy, that supplies are going down and Americans use too much, is being completely rewritten. Americans, in fact, are using less energy. Meanwhile, a convergence of new exploration and drilling techniques, and rising global demand that is keeping prices high, is producing what looks to be the most …
