The energy abundance that helped propel the United States to global leadership in the 19th and 20th centuries is back; if the energy revolution now taking shape lives up to its full potential, we are headed into a new century
The energy abundance that helped propel the United States to global leadership in the 19th and 20th centuries is back; if the energy revolution now taking shape lives up to its full potential, we are headed into a new century in which the location of the world’s energy resources and the structure of the world’s energy trade support American affluence at home and power abroad. …
Domestically, the energy bonanza changes the American outlook far more dramatically than most people yet realize. This is a Big One, a game changer, and it will likely be a major factor in propelling the U.S. to the next (and still unknown) stage of development — toward the next incarnation of the American Dream.
— Geopolitics scholar Walter Russell Mead, The American Interest, July 15, 2012
On Nov. 7, 1973, Richard Nixon became the first of several presidents to call for a United States that relied only on itself for energy. Nixon’s “Project Independence” evoked the Manhattan Project, which had developed atom bombs. Here the proximate foe was an Arab oil embargo and America’s resulting oil crisis. Among the progeny of Project Independence: a 55-mph national speed limit, the conversion of oil-burning electrical plants to coal, a redirection of highway funds to mass transit and completion of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System that pushes oil from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez.
In the decades since Nixon’s clarion call for discovery and conservation, Americans have heard more pessimism than optimism about achieving energy independence. We may be perpetual hostages, we’ve been told, to hostile regimes in oil-rich nations. The latest incarnation: Iran’s threat to close the Strait of Hormuz if the West keeps pressing Tehran to halt its nuclear program.
Today the narrative is turning, and sharply. A recent Wall Street Journal headline synthesized the good news: “Expanded Oil Drilling Helps U.S. Wean Itself From Mideast.” The Journal story, one in a gusher of reports that would thrill the departed Nixon, says that by 2020, nearly half of the crude oil America consumes will be produced at home, while 82 percent will come from this side of the Atlantic, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. By 2035, oil shipments from the Middle East to North America “could almost be nonexistent,” the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries now predicts.
Fuel-stingy engines and development of renewable energy sources deserve ample credit. What’s really driving the positive trend, though, is a controversial near-quadrupling of oil and gas harvesting investment in the Western Hemisphere over the last decade. Nowhere is the resulting energy boom more stark than in high plains reaches of the Williston Basin. Named for the North Dakota community that now is America’s fastest-growing small city, the underground rock formations shelter rich pockets of oil and natural gas beneath 140,000 square miles of grassy remoteness in the two Dakotas, Montana and southern Saskatchewan and Manitoba.
Tough place, North Dakota: In the 1870s, years of abnormally mild weather lured thousands of pioneers. When vicious winters returned in the next decade, they prompted one of the oddest sights in the history of the American West: Wagon trains headed east.
Now, though, taciturn North Dakota is leading a U.S. energy rush. New technologies — such as the rock-rattling “fracking” that environmentalists say threatens to pollute underground aquifers — enable the recovery of huge petroleum supplies from shale fields once considered tapped-out or too expensive to develop. In March, North Dakota surpassed Alaska, long boastful of its crude output, as the nation’s No. 2 oil producer, trailing Texas.
Rising petroleum stocks from North Dakota and elsewhere are exerting modest downward pressure on retail prices.
America’s freshly encouraging projections of this nation’s oil and natural gas reserves come with no guarantees the economics of energy ever will be stable for long. North Dakota and other U.S. oil patches long have ridden cycles of boom and bust, abundance and scarcity.
In the early 1980s, itinerant Texans flew Lone Star flags over Williston campgrounds, although the most desperate new arrivals — wary of the winter that’s never far off — walked through town door to door, begging homeowners to sell their houses. Then, after oil prices collapsed later in that decade, huge trailer parks stood empty, their waist-high utility posts lined up like tombstones. And 25 percent of all Williston real estate was forfeited to the city for nonpayment of taxes.
In the best of worlds, a United States blessed with newly recoverable resources would develop them safely, relying as much as possible on its own secure supply channels until alternative energy sources supplant fossil fuels.
The best of worlds may not be the world we have. Still, if it’s good enough to someday let the U.S. come closer to energy independence, Americans would celebrate their hard-won freedom from perilous geopolitics in some of Earth’s most dangerous neighborhoods. A few of those Americans might even praise a prescient Richard Nixon for his clarion call.
