Will U.S. take steps to keep the ‘Shale Revolution’ going?
At least one observer wonders whether it’s time to start protecting up the burgeoning U.S. oil industry. Chip Register, managing director of Sapient Global Markets, writes in Forbes:
“One possibility would be for the government to level the playing field with OPEC and others by introducing tariffs on cheap foreign oil imports, with the goal of driving separation between the North American energy economy and the chaos of the international markets. While this may seem extreme, it may be necessary to protect this young yet highly strategic industry from going extinct.”
The global price of oil is off about 25 percent since June, and it’s already having an impact on U.S. drilling operations. As Real Clear Energy’s Nick Cunningham noted in a post Wednesday, there are now 1,590 active oil rigs in the country, the lowest level in six weeks.
Drilling in shale-oil formations, largely using hydraulic fracturing, helped the U.S. reach 8.95 million barrels of oil per day this month, the highest level in 29 years. But as a story in Bloomberg points out, that growth trajectory is difficult to maintain:
“Oil production from shale drilling, which bores horizontally through hard rock, declines more than 80 percent in four years, more than three times faster than conventional, vertical wells, according to the IEA [International Energy Agency].”
Shale-oil production is relatively expensive compared with imported oil, so it won’t take much of a drop in global prices to make some domestic operations unprofitable. The Bloomberg story quotes Philip Verleger (an economic adviser to President Ford and director of energy policy for President Carter), who says that if oil falls to $70 a barrel, production in the Bakken shale formation could plummet 28 percent to 800,000 barrels a day; in July the production level was 1.1 million barrels a day.
The notion Register raised isn’t new: In early October, Ed Hirs, a lecturer in energy economics at the University of Houston, touted a paper he’d written suggesting that the U.S. government intervene to restrict oil imports and protect U.S. producers.
“We need to act in our own best interest,” Hirs said at an energy symposium, according to Forbes. America’s oil growth is so strong “that we can de-link from the global market.”
