Shale Gas Booms Globally -- Big Green Crashes & Burns

A Shale Gas Summit is being held on the 23rd and 24th of April, in Beijing, to assess the global impacts of the shale gas explosion.

Shale gas revolution created nearly 10% of all new US jobs in 2011

The World Economic Forum report, which highlighted the role that the energy industry can play in reviving the global economy, comes during a presidential election year as candiates argue about high U.S. unemployment and energy policy.

The report said the oil and gas industry contributed 37,000 direct jobs in 2011, which led to the creation of an additional 111,000 indirect jobs during the same period. It said the multiplier effect for solar and wind energy were lower during operation, but higher at up to 3.3 times during construction.

“We always suspected that energy had a vital role to play in the economic recovery but we were still surprised when the data uncovered the magnitude of the sector’s multiplier effects,” Roberto Bocca, head of energy Iidustries at the World Economic Forum, said in a release.

Early success for China's shale gas exploration well drilling: China has perhaps the world's largest deposits of shale gas. Once production of Chinese shale ramps up, world energy markets will never be the same.

Meanwhile South Africa may have a shale gas resource in excess of 485 trillion cubic feet. This is said to be enough to create hundreds of thousands of jobs and provide hundreds of years of energy for the troubled nation in southern Africa.

In fact, many analysts are beginning to see the oil shale revolution as the energy equivalent of the Berlin Wall crashing down, in terms of global impact.

On the green energy front, the UK is just beginning to assess its £120 billion wind energy blunder, and what it will have to do to recover from the disaster.

And in the US, the magnitude of damage from Obama's misguided pro-green energy policies is still mounting. The jobs destruction from the president's naive approach to national energy policy will continue long after he leaves office.

It’s unclear how much taxpayers spend on the 94 green building initiatives in the form of grants, loans, technical assistance, and tax incentives. That’s because many are combined with larger programs, and are not priced out individually by federal agencies. Equally unclear is the cost benefit of these programs, because two-thirds are not measured for their performance, GAO reported.

...“If you suggest a program that’s part of a hot issue for the President, like energy-efficiency, you’re likely as an agency to get more favor and funding in the budget,” Ellis said. But that practice results in enormous overhead costs for separate program staffs, and paves the way for the type of overlap that undermines the whole effort, Ellis said. “How can you deliver services and achieve the overall goal of saving energy when every cook in the federal government is trying to get their hands in the energy-efficiency pot?” Ellis said. _FiscalTimes