Itdoes no harm to admit that there are very different opinions aboutenergy matters than mine in this old world of ours. For instance, “ShaleGas will Rock your World” is the title of an article (in the New York Times)by Amy Myers Jaffe, who – nine years earlier – had the cheek toquestion my knowledge of the world oil present and future, praisinginstead the inquiries of Michael Lynch, who attracted quite a bit ofattention by claiming that the price of oil would collapse. As thingsturned out, I might have been the only person in a rather large room(during the IAEE international conference in Rome) who understood thatOPEC was tired of playing games with its customers, and had launched thestrategy that started the oil price to its 2008 crest of $147 perbarrel. That price was quite enough to help push the global macroeconomyinto a partial meltdown, from which it has yet to recover, and evenmore bad news might be up ahead if the price of oil continues to risefrom its present level.

We are repeatedly told that shalegas will not only “rock our world”, but ‘change our game’. I certainlyhope this is true, although I suspect that many of the promoters ofshale gas have adopted some propaganda tricks similar to those employedby the firm from whom my wife purchases our electricity, and whoapparently are still be able to convince a portion of their clientelethat the truth is anything that does not sound like a lie.

Not long ago I was informed by a gentleman that geographically theexploitable Marcellus shale deposit in the U.S. is as large as onshoreSweden. It pained me deeply to hear this because – like myself – he hadonce worked in engineering for the U. S. Navy, but even so I could notrefrain from informing him that if this claim were true, the energyworries of the United States of America would be completely over. Thesad thing here is that the Energy Secretary of the United States – aNobel Laureate – is unable to tell us what we need to know aboutaccessible energy in his country, which is an important topic for almostevery country in the world.

At the present time it iswidely known that thanks to the current and potential application ofwhat is often described as a revolutionary new technology – calledHydraulic Fracture Stimulation (or ‘fracking’), which has been aroundfor 60 years – to what is actually a very old resource (shale naturalgas has been exploited on a small scale for many years), the U.S.possesses a “hundred year” supply of natural gas at present consumptionrates. As far as I am concerned, the way to deal with this claim is toignore it, because demonstrating that it is incorrect only requires thekind of mathematics that Dr Strangelove would have described as“simple”, and perhaps even within the scope of many secondary schoolstudents.