WOLF: Energy Obamanomics: No green jobs and plenty of red ink - Washington Times

It wasn’t enough to preside over the first-ever downgrade of America’s credit rating. Now the Obama administration is downgrading America’s energy supply as well. “We’ll invest $15 billion a year over the next decade in renewable energy, creating five million new green jobs that pay well, can’t be outsourced and help end our dependence on foreign oil,” candidate Barack Obama promised in the fall of 2008. But why stop there? Why not claim that you can heal the planet - whatever that means - and control the ocean levels too? Oh yeah, he did.

The Americas, Not the Middle East, Will Be the World Capital of Energy - By Amy Myers Jaffe | Foreign Policy

For half a century, the global energy supply's center of gravity has been the Middle East. This fact has had self-evidently enormous implications for the world we live in -- and it's about to change.

By the 2020s, the capital of energy will likely have shifted back to the Western Hemisphere, where it was prior to the ascendancy of Middle Eastern megasuppliers such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait in the 1960s. The reasons for this shift are partly technological and partly political. Geologists have long known that the Americas are home to plentiful hydrocarbons trapped in hard-to-reach offshore deposits, on-land shale rock, oil sands, and heavy oil formations. The U.S. endowment of unconventional oil is more than 2 trillion barrels, with another 2.4 trillion in Canada and 2 trillion-plus in South America -- compared with conventional Middle Eastern and North African oil resources of 1.2 trillion. The problem was always how to unlock them economically.

U.S. revises amount of Marcellus gas higher, much higher | Philadelphia Inquirer | 08/24/2011

The U.S. Geological Survey on Tuesday dramatically increased its estimate of the natural gas contained in the Marcellus Shale, the deep deposit that has triggered a drilling frenzy in Pennsylvania.

The USGS now estimates that the shale contains about 84 trillion cubic feet of undiscovered, technically recoverable natural gas and 3.4 billion barrels of undiscovered, technically recoverable natural gas liquids.

The agency's latest numbers are 42 times greater than its 2002 assessment, which said the shale contained about two trillion cubic feet of gas.