Without Obama, US Energy & Economic Prospects Improve

US President Obama has big plans for using the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to shut down a large number of US energy projects and enterprises. The EPA's destructive plans are already in the works, and will be enacted over the next few months even if Obama is defeated. Fortunately, a new Romney / Ryan administration would soon be on the job to shut down those shenanigans.

With a new US administration will come a new and brighter day for US energy -- with healthy add-on effects to the US economy at large. Here is a look at the big advantage that the US will have over Europe and East Asia -- if Obama is defeated:

Some fifty new projects have been unveiled in the US petrochemical industry. A $30bn investment blitz in underway in ethylene and fertilizer plants alone.

A study by the American Chemistry Council said the shale gas bonanza has reversed the fortunes of the chemical, plastics, aluminium, iron and steel, rubber, coated metals, and glass industries. "This was virtually unthinkable five years ago," said the body’s president, Cal Dooley.

...The revival of the chemical industry is a spin-off from the greater drama of America’s energy rebound, though a very big one. As many readers will have seen, the US energy department said last week that the country will produce 11.4m barrels a day (b/d) of oil, biofuels, and liquid hydrocarbons next year, almost as much as Saudi Arabia.

...America looks poised to become the world’s biggest producer in 2014. It will approach the Holy Grail of "energy independence" before the end of the decade. This is largely due to hydraulic fracturing - blasting rock with water jets - to extract shale gas and oil, though solar power and onshore wind are playing their part.

Europe is going in the opposite direction, drifting towards energy suicide. So is Japan as it shuts down its nuclear industry after the Fukushima disaster. China is more hard-headed, as it needs to be. The country is adding 20m cars a year. Chinese oil imports are rising by an extra 0.5m b/d annually.

As of last week, US natural gas prices were roughly one third of European levels. The German chemicals group BASF said it had become impossible to match the US on production costs.

Asia is facing an even greater handicap as Japan soaks up supply of liquefied natural gas (LNG) to offset the closure of its nuclear power stations. Prices on the Pacific rim are near $15 per million British thermal units (BTU), compared to $3 in the US. _Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

H/T Anti-Green

If Obama is re-elected, all of those positive plans could easily come screeching to a halt, as the EPA moves to regulate the shale bonanza out of existence -- as well as a large number of other energy enterprises.

The green movement is composed largely of very impractical ideologues. They have achieved ascendancy in several governments of advanced nations -- including the US, Germany, Australia, and several others -- to a greater or lesser extent. Greens reject reliable forms of energy such as nuclear and hydrocarbons, in favour of the intermittent unreliables -- big wind and big solar.

If Europe does not find a way out of the green miasma of the energy starvationist lefty-Luddite greens, it will find itself growing demographically old in an environment of increasing energy scarcity. It is bad enough to grow old. But to grow old in the dark and cold -- that is a sad legacy for a once great continent.