EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson says the natural gas industry needs to be out front on hydraulic fracturing regulations. With all due respect, that's already happening.

Fracking has been used to free oil and natural gas trapped in subterranean rock formations for six decades - safely. Recall that none other than Administrator Jackson told a congressional committee in May she knew of no instances of water contamination caused by hydraulic fracturing.

That's because the industry members who're producing this important energy source are committed to best practices and guidelines, developed from field experience and in cooperation with API.

For example, in Texas, where the Barnett Shale and Eagle Ford plays are producing clean-burning natural gas - more than 4 billion cubic feet a day in the Ba... more »

Yesterday I posted some initial reactions to the latest articles in, as Michael Levi puts it, "The New York Times' war on shale gas..." More from Levi:

I hate to say it, but on the whole, both pieces are of pretty poor quality...[reporter Ian] Urbina was clearly looking for negative views of shale gas, and had no problem finding them. Given the massive size of the industry, and the number of financial bets being placed upon the sector, that shouldn't be a surprise. What is a surprise is that Urbina hasn't done much to put them in context...The Times descriptions of the emails (not just in the article, but in the document database) also betray a serious lack of understanding of the industry

Ken Cohen from Exxon wonders: "Don't facts matter anymore?"

In the latest installment (stories publis... more »

What do you think of when you think of oil and natural gas? Energy, of course - energy for America today and tomorrow. But there's more to it than just the fuel to fill our tanks and heat our homes. Oil and gas are securing Americans' retirements as well, filling public pension funds in dramatic fashion according to a new study.

The economic advisory firm Sonecon examined the performance of oil and natural gas investments in the two largest public pension funds in 17 states over five years (2005-2009) and found that those assets out performed other kinds of investments. And not just a little. Lead researcher Robert Shapiro:

"Our analysis found that the public pension funds examined here achieved five-year cumulative returns averaging 42 percent on their oil and natural gas investments, com... more »

The Financial Times: US Producers Break New Ground in Texas Basin: US oil companies are rushing to stake claims in the Permian Basin as new technology opens up previously uneconomic rock in the most oil-rich part of the nation. Chevron, Devon Energy, Apache and others are acquiring acreage and stepping up drilling operations - some by more than 50 per cent - after they discovered the same horizontal drilling and multi-staged hydraulic fracturing that led to a trebling of US natural gas supplies in recent years could also economically extract oil from shale and other tight rocks. "It's a major, major modern boom," said Pete Stark, a vice-president at IHS CERA, the energy consultancy. The number of rigs drilling in the biggest, Texas portion, of the Permian has risen from 68 in June 2009 to... more »

You've probably heard the line: The United States holds 2 percent of the world's oil reserves but consumes 25 percent of the world's oil. It's boilerplate rhetoric for folks who'd like Americans to think the United States is both running out of its own oil and using too much of everyone else's. President Obama has used this misleading line in two major policy speeches recently (here and here), and others have followed suit.

Let's focus on the first point. The 2 percent stat lacks context and a false impression results. The figure refers to "proved" reserves - that is, an official classification of oil "that has been discovered (and) is economically and commercially viable," says API's Marcus Koblitz. The McKelvey Diagram below illustrates how narrow the definition is:

U.S. Sen. Lisa Murko... more »