Common Resources

Are New Shale Gas Regulations in Illinois the Strongest in the Country?

Last month, Illinois passed new legislation (SB 1715) strengthening and updating its oil and gas regulations. Governor Pat Quinn and sponsors of the new law claim it will give the state “the strongest, most effective drilling safeguards enacted by any state in the nation” while still allowing the industry to “develop in a responsible manner.” […]

Gasland II: Not Truthland

The second round of unabashed and one-sided bashing of the oil and gas industry, and in particular shale gas, played on HBO Tuesday. Gasland II opens with comments from Robert Howarth, a Cornell professor who has questioned the climate benefits of natural gas relative to coal with his own estimates, which wrongly assumed that all […]

The State of State Shale Gas Regulation

For the last year or so, we’ve been cataloging and analyzing state-level shale gas regulations, as part of our larger project on managing the risks of shale gas development. Regular readers may remember the previews of that research posted here and on the RFF website, featuring maps of regulatory variation. I’m happy to announce that […]

What the President’s Climate Plan Means for Natural Gas

If the President’s Plan can ever get out of the blocks—by no means a given with the legal challenges coming—natural gas is likely to be the big winner in the electricity fuel mix at the expense of coal, and may also make further inroads against oil in our transportation fleet. Because of the much lower […]

Fracking on Federal Lands: Stewards, not Regulators

Last week, the Bureau of Land Management proposed new rules for oil and gas fracking on federal lands. Some industry critics immediately attacked the proposal, arguing not that it was too strict, but that it shouldn’t exist at all. These arguments miss the mark. (Side note: We have not yet digested the package of rules, so […]

US Shale Gas Development in Review

The United States has seen rapid recent development of shale gas. What are the factors behind the notable growth in the past decade? And what does it mean for shale gas development elsewhere in the world? Alan Krupnick and I examine the history of the US shale gas boom in a new RFF discussion paper. […]

Is There a Case for Export Restrictions on US Liquefied Natural Gas?

As noted in earlier posts, in an amazingly rapid turn of events, concerns in the United States over controlling natural gas imports have shifted to anxieties over limiting gas exports. This “reversal of fortunes” is the result of development of a commercially viable system of extracting natural gas from deep shale, of which the US […]

The IMF Takes on Energy Subsidies

It has long and widely been accepted that subsidies that promote the production and consumption of energy – thereby disguising its real cost to society – do little to benefit mankind. On the output side, second-guessing the market distorts firms’ decisions about optimal investment strategies. Among users, access to below-cost energy encourages waste, with environmental […]

Shale Gas Priorities? I’d Like to Use a Lifeline.

Yesterday, we released a survey of 215 shale gas development experts that found a surprising amount of agreement between experts from academia, industry, government, and environmental NGOs on what potential environmental risks due to hydraulic fracturing for natural gas are of most pressing need for attention. Why, though, is a survey of experts a useful […]

The Jefferson Memorial, from Space

A set of NASA images from the Suomi polar-orbiting satellite has been getting some traffic today, driven by an article by Radiolab co-host Robert Krulwich. It shows bright lights from the Bakken oil field in North Dakota, looking like a metropolis where maps show little settlement. The images are very cool, especially for energy/infrastructure nerds. There’s obvious points to […]