Free market, not government policies, drives energy boom

[Geee]

Washington Examiner:

There's an awful lot that's stale in the debate on government energy policy.
Some stale arguments are nevertheless valid: It's dangerous to depend heavily on Middle Eastern oil. Others have increasingly been seen as dubious: that global warming caused by human activity will result in catastrophe.

There's stale talk about federal and state laws that promised great change but have produced very little. Electric cars, even with subsidies, are no larger a part of the auto fleet than they were 100 years ago.

Renewable energy sources like wind and solar still produce only a tiny percentage of electricity. That offshore wind farm hasn't gone up in Nantucket Sound, and the Mojave Desert is never going to be covered with solar panels.

Ethanol subsidies have jacked up the price of corn, raising the price of meat here and tortillas in Mexico. But the subsidies haven't done much for gas mileage, and presidential candidates heading to Iowa now call for abolishing them.

In contrast to the marginal effects of these much-ballyhooed public policies, there has been a huge breakthrough in energy production in the past couple of years.

Petroleum engineers working for private companies have used a technique called "hydraulic fracking," injecting vast amounts of water into rock, to release commercially viable amounts of natural gas and oil.

Hydraulic fracking has resulted in a boom in the Bakken oil shale formation under North Dakota and Montana. North Dakota is now the No. 4 state in oil production.

And hydraulic fracking has made commercially viable huge volumes of natural gas previously imprisoned in shale rock in western Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration has estimated that there is at least six times as much natural gas available now as a decade ago as well as a big increase in commercially recoverable oil.