Or shalers selling oil to the US market could resort to machinations to keep prices high here so that development remains profitable. Kinda depends on whether conservatives can help make it happen or if liberals can prevent it.

But I’m afraid you’re right. No one could find fault with a genuine renaissance in US energy production, especially if it can be managed with a minimum of environmental hazard. The benefits would be enormous.

But I suspect much of these glowing promises of a technologial cavalry coming to our rescue are merely a way of lulling us to the dangers and problems we face, and to justify business as usual; especially since foreign customers would compete with domestic ones and prices would remain high.

I do not believe that there are shadowy corporate or government conspiracies designed to suppress new technologies that might solve or ameliorate our energy problems. The car and oil companies are definitely not trying to bury that car that runs on water.

However, I do believe that every conceivable effort is being made to promote and expand highly profitable technologies currently in place for as long as possible.

When fish populations decline, fishermen don’t reduce their harvest and let them recover. They buy bigger boats, go farther out, and seek other species. No conspiracies here, its just the market at work.

Did I post this Is Shale Oil Production from Bakken Headed for a Run with “The Red Queen”? when I read it a couple of months ago? Probably not. (See the most recent post on this topic here.) As usual for The Oil Drum blog, the comments are as educational as the alpha post.

Here’s the thing. Fracking is expensive. So the price needs to remain high to sustain it. Shale oil wells decline quickly. So you need to keep replacing them with new wells, more often than the easy oil of yesteryear. The environmental damage is greater than conventional wells. Natural gas is great stuff, but we don’t use it for transportation very much, and our infrastructure for other uses lags the spike in production. The excess has to be exported, or stored, or burned at the well head.

The recent boom will bust. It can be used as a bridge to the future of energy or as a way of ignoring that future.

Choose wisely.