Drill, baby, drill! Let’s face it - shale fracking has saved the West

Imagine what the world would look like today if US fracking technology and America’s wildcat drillers had not delivered the shale revolution.

The liberal democracies would have their backs to the wall.

All those books about the death of the West would be all too credible, including the latest bestseller in France, La Défaite de l’Occident by Emmanuel Todd, a modern outing of Oswald Spengler’s dark classic in the 1920s.

A vertical oil drilling rig in Midland, Texas: America has gone from energy-import basket case in 2008 to become the world’s largest producer of crude oil, petroleum products and natural gas.Credit: Bloomberg

This Gallic Anglo-bashing and Kremlin apologia manages to skip over the elemental geopolitical fact that America has gone from energy-import basket case in 2008 to become the world’s largest producer of crude oil, petroleum products and natural gas by a wide margin.

The US has been adding a new North Sea every three years. Feedstock from cheap domestic gas has driven a secular revival of the US chemical industry, which you can see in the petrochemical corridor stretching across the Gulf Coast from Galveston to New Orleans.

The Rust Belt from Pennsylvania to Ohio has returned to life as the Plastics Belt. The American Chemical Association says the industry exports $US180 billion ($269 billion) a year. The shale effect has led to 351 projects since 2010, pulling in a quarter of a trillion of global investment in petrochemicals alone.

Kamala Harris called for a fracking ban in 2019 and regretted it, learning from the derision that no candidate has a prayer of reaching the White House with such unworldly, Left-Californian reflexes. For starters, you have to win the 19 electoral college votes of Pennsylvania, home to Marcellus shale.

Three and a half years as US vice president have since given her a crash course in energy security and global geopolitics. Perhaps somebody whispered in her ear that without fracking, America would have to fire up coal plants with twice the CO2 footprint, or told her that there are 283 million cars on the road in the US and that 280 million run off petroleum.

She had to kill this albatross going into the election, and last week she did. “We can increase a thriving clean energy economy without banning fracking,” she told CNN.

Fifteen years ago, the US was on track to become the largest importer of liquefied natural gas (LNG). It would not have been able to rescue Europe with “freedom molecules” after the invasion of Ukraine. It would have been competing desperately for scarce global supplies to keep its own economy afloat.

‘No one hates US LNG more than Vladimir Putin.’

Daniel Yergin, author of The New Map: Energy, Climate and the Clash of Nations.

Instead, it has overtaken Qatar to become the largest exporter of LNG. This swing from net consumer to net supplier has added enough gas to world markets to more than neutralise the loss of Russian pipeline supply to Europe.

“No one hates US LNG more than Vladimir Putin,” said Daniel Yergin, author of The New Map: Energy, Climate and the Clash of Nations.

Had fracking never got off the ground, Putin’s energy blackmail would have succeeded. Europe would have faced dangerously depleted gas inventories, chronic blackouts, a winter freeze and the real prospect of an industrial death spiral.

The “doves” and business-as-usual interests would have prevailed – just as they prevailed after the seizure of Crimea in 2014 – and would have compelled Ukraine to accept a dirty Munich-like “settlement” that settled nothing. Washington would have acquiesced.

Whether you think Putin would have stopped at four annexed oblasts and client-state control over rump Kyiv, or used his gains as a forward launchpad to restore something closer to the Tsarist borders of 1914, there is little doubt that Europe would have been horribly fractured and partially “Finland-ised”. In short, the EU project would have ceased to exist as a motivating historical force, if it survived at all.

American frackers have profoundly changed the shape of the global oil market. Cast your mind back to 2008, the moment when the American Century really did seem to be dying before our eyes. The US financial system had seized up. General Motors faced liquidation. The US dollar was in freefall. A famous Brazilian model said she would no longer accept US currency.

US output of crude oil had collapsed to 5 million barrels a day (b/d). America had to import almost 10 million b/d to cover its wasteful consumption, pushing the current account deficit to 6 per cent of GDP.

Brent crude was trading at $US148. We were looking at a world of exorbitant oil and gas prices as far as the eye could see, entailing a haemorrhage of several trillion US dollars a year from the democracies to Russia, Saudi Arabia and Opec.

This dystopian world was averted. The US became a net exporter of petroleum in 2020 for the first time since 1949. Crude output is today running at an all-time high of 13.3 million b/d, on track to hit 14 million b/d by late next year. The Permian Basin in Texas produces more than Saudi Arabia’s giant Ghawar Field.

The Opec-Russia cartel has been withholding 3 million b/d to prop up crude prices, but they still cannot keep Brent prices much above $US75 ($US50 in 2008 money), well short of the $US80 to $US100 target range most need to fund their budgets. They are instead surrendering global share to US and Canadian frackers.

The killer point is that frackers respond to increases in world demand within months or even weeks, chopping off every major crude boom before it gets going. This caps the global price and massively reduces the hydrocarbon rent that the West must pay each year to the autocracies. Furthermore, the frackers keep pulling rabbits out of the hat.

Better technology – multiple drills from one pad, longer lateral drills, smart bits, 3D seismic imaging – has made the process so accurate that it can match all but the most efficient Opec states. Exxon says the break-even cost of Permian shale assets acquired last year from Pioneer is less than $US35 a barrel.

Needless to say, the experts never saw it coming. As Carole Nakhle from Crystol Energy points out, forecasts by the International Energy Agency did not even mention shale in 2008, then said it was “temporary” in 2014, and so on. It made the same mistake with renewables, underestimating the plunging cost of green energy and the scale of the global roll-out by orders of magnitude.

Let us never forget that America’s frackers have done us a great favour. They changed the balance of global strategic and economic power to our benefit, and they have kept it going for long enough to close the window of opportunity for the China-Russia-Iran axis.

We can see in hindsight that it was the US that came roaring back from the trauma of 2008, turbo-charged by cheap energy and cleansed by Schumpeterian creative destruction. It was a hubristic China that clung too long to its dysfunctional model of Leninist capitalism, and which is now trapped in a structural post-bubble depression, overlaid by precipitous demographic decline.

The frackers bought America and the liberal democracies an extra quarter-century. The next quarter-century will go to those countries that win the clean-tech race.

America’s Inflation Reduction Act suggests to me that the US will in the end master this post-fossil challenge with the same panache as it mastered shale – so long as it shuts out the decadent distractions of the culture war.

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