Shale Boom Spreads; Green Energy Crashing and Burning

The boom in shale gas & oil is spreading to other sectors of industry, despite the effort of Luddite greens inside and outside the Obama administration.

...a huge, 100-year source of cheap gas will make plenty of winners...

Chemical and fertilizer manufacturers like Dow and Potash, for example, use gas as a fuel and a feedstock. And pipeline companies—when they’re run right—make money by moving molecules from place to place. As gas prices fall electric utilities will start burning more of it and the commodity will find its way into new uses like truck fleets.

“The guys who win when shale gas grows are the ser­vice guys, the pipeline and processor guys, and the end user of this product,” says David Pursell, managing director at Tudor, Pickering, Holt & Co., an energy investment bank in Houston.

Kinder Morgan’s $21 billion takeover of El Paso Corp.—at a 45% premium to its 52-week average price—is clear evidence of pipeline capacity’s rising value. Other pipeline takeover targets include Williams Cos. and Holly Energy Partners.

Brad Handler of Credit Suisse in New York also sees a “very bullish outlook for services businesses”...

Overseas the shale play is just beginning. Geologists have found huge deposits in the U.K. and Poland, yet the entire international pressure-pumping fleet outside of Russia is just 2 million hp, Pursell says. Shale gas “is everywhere, and if you’re going to see significant growth in production, you’re going to have to see a lot of growth in horsepower,” he says. _Forbesvia_GWPF

Meanwhile in Europe, where the green revolution has been roaring along for many years, the limits to wishful thinking are beginning to enforce themselves. In Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, and several other EU countries, the many problems of trying to fit inappropriate energy technologies into modern industrial infrastructures are beginning to become intolerable.

The current Socialist government, forecast to be ejected from power in general elections on Sunday, axed subsidy tariffs for solar photovoltaic (PV) electricity technology projects in December last year. Spain is the world’s largest per capita wind energy producer, with subsidies for renewable energy having fostered a €20bn sector that has become a pillar of state energy policy....

...The government argues that the action was needed to reduce the financial deficit in Spain’s electricity market, where end-user prices have been consistently too low to cover suppliers’ costs. _GWPF

Almost all solar companies are deep in the red, wind turbine manufacturers complain about lack of demand and are reporting growing losses. The stock index Renixx, which lists 30 international Greentech companies, has lost 56 percent since the year-high in April. _GWPF

The bumbling administration of US president Barack Obama is attempting, for ideological reasons, to take the US down the same ruinous path that European nations have already shown to be a trap. In a one-two punch of devastation, Obama is pushing unreliable green energy technologies onto the US power system while attempting to destroy the use of more reliable energy technologies such as nuclear, offshore oil, Canadian oil sands, shale oil & gas, newer clean coal technologies, and other proven energy winners.

It is unclear why Mr. Obama is pursuing the path to energy failure. No one can see inside the US President's mind, after all. But if the US is to climb out of its current economic quagmire, it will need to pursue quite a different approach.

More: The TransCanada Corp has upped the stakes in the Keystone pipeline standoff with President Obama. Within days of Obama's announcement that he will delay making a decision on the pipeline, TransCanada has submitted a re-routing plan which appears to address all of the US president's objections to the route. The ball is in Obama's court, but it is likely that he will ignore it, since he is in a poor position to play this game to begin with.

Needless the say, the battle over the Canada oil sands pipeline is far from over.