SPINDLETOP ON STEROIDS

It’s difficult to overstate the benefits to Americans that flowed from the well Anthony Lucas drilled into a salt dome near Beaumont, Texas, in January, 1901.

The first oil well was drilled in Titusville, Pa. in 1859;  Standard Oil was incorporated in Pittsburgh in 1868.  But petroleum was used mostly to make kerosene, which replaced whale oil in oil lamps. (Yes, environmentalists, it was John D. Rockefeller, not Greenpeace, who saved the whales.)

Then suddenly within days, Captain Lucas’ "gusher" was producing more oil than every other well in the U.S. combined.  Spindletop changed petroleum from a niche market into the great engine of our economy.

Before it, trains, ships and factories were powered by coal.  Spindletop produced so much oil the price dropped to a few cents a barrel.  Oil became cheaper than coal, and was cleaner and easier to transport.  The Santa Fe Railroad had just one oil-driven locomotive in 1901.  By 1905, it had 227.

Factories too switched from coal to oil.  Costs of production — and the price of manufactured goods — dropped.  Urban air got cleaner. 

There were only about 8,000 autos in the U.S. in 1900.  By 1914, there were 1.7 million on our roads — thanks to Henry Ford’s Model T, and the gasoline that made the Model T practical.

Spindletop made possible the mechanization of agriculture, which increased food production and dropped its price.  Food got from farm to market faster, and transportation costs declined.

Because the necessities of life cost less, we could spend more on what for ages past were luxuries only the rich could afford.  This, in turn, created more industries and more good paying jobs.

Buoyed by cheap food and cheap energy, the middle class grew in size and affluence.  It’s shrinking now, as Americans get squeezed between stagnant wages and rising prices for food and gas.

But in this dark hour comes an energy development that can revive our economy, restore upward mobility to the middle class, and reduce the threat of Islamist terror.

This Spindletop-on-steroids is natural gas trapped in "black" shale, made accessible by hydraulic fracturing (fracking).  The Marcellus Shale formation alone may contain 84 trillion cubic feet of recoverable natural gas, the U.S. Geological Survey said in August.  That’s up from the 2 tcf the USGS had estimated in 2002.

And even that may be conservative.  The New York Dept. of Environmental Conservation now estimates that Marcellus may contain 489 tcf.  New York state uses 1.1 tcf a year.

Before fracking, to burn natural gas to generate electricity was like feeding filet mignon to your dog.  Now, it’s the most economical way.  The "levelized cost" of generating a megawatt hour from a new plant is $63 for natural gas; $95 for coal; $97 for wind; $114 for nuclear; $211 for solar, according to the Energy Information Administration.

As a motor vehicle fuel, compressed natural gas costs about a third less than gasoline. Vehicles powered by natural gas reduce pollutants 60 to 90 percent.  They’re safer, because if there’s an accident, there’s little likelihood of fire or an explosion.

There are tradeoffs, of course.  The tanks for compressed natural gas are bulky. and take up a lot of trunk space.  NGVs have about half the range of gasoline powered vehicles, and there aren’t many places on the road to fuel up.  It costs between $3,000 and $8,000 to convert a car to run on either gasoline or natural gas (natural gas is actually easier on your engine; the conversion cost is mostly to put in the fuel tanks), and the one car in the U.S. manufactured to run specifically on natural gas, the Honda Civic GX CNG, costs about $4,000 more than a gasoline powered Honda Civic.

Fewer than one percent of vehicles in the U.S. are NGVs.  Most of the disadvantages would diminish rapidly in natural gas were more widely used.  The price of NGV vehicles would drop substantially if production were expanded.  A chain of convenience stores in Oklahoma announced this year it would provide refueling for NGVs.

Within six months of the Spindletop gusher, the population of Beaumont swelled to 50,000 from less than 10,000, and more than 100 new oil companies were incorporated.  Before shale gas lowers our electric bills and the cost of commuting, it will produce millions of new, well-paying jobs.

Marcellus Shale added 44,000 jobs in Pennsylvania and 13,000 jobs in West Virginia in 2009, according to researchers at Penn State.  Ohio could add more than 200,000 jobs in just four years, an industry group there estimated in September.  That’s just one shale gas deposit.  The Utica Shale looks like it’s even bigger. 

Shale gas deposits are being discovered all over the US.  Here’s a map:

We could be energy independent in less than a decade.  Iran, Saudi Arabia and Russia stand to lose their geopolitical clout.

Nothing in this life is all gain and no pain, but shale gas comes as close as anything ever has. So why are Democrats trying to strangle Spindletop II in its crib?

The EIA’s figures make it clear why "renewable" energy firms like Solyndra go bust, despite receiving massive subsidies.  So President Barack Hussein Obama is trying to jack up the price of energy to make solar and wind seem less outrageously expensive.

"Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket," Mr. Obama told the editorial board of the San Francisco Chronicle in 2008.

Cap and trade, fortunately, is dead.  But new regulations Mr. Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency plans to impose will cost electric utilities an estimated $129 billion, and force 20 percent of coal-fired electric plants to close.

A few politically connected people such as Solyndra’s George Kaiser have made millions from "green" energy subsidies and mandates.  They, in turn, give lots of money to Democrats.

Shale gas undermines this backscratching.  Abundant, safe, inexpensive and environmentally friendly, it destroys the arguments for wind and solar power.

"Eventually civilization may well run out of natural gas and other fossil fuels that are recoverable at a reasonable cost, and may be forced to switch permanently to other sources of energy," wrote Michael Lind in the liberal Webzine Salon.

"These are more likely to be nuclear fission or nuclear fusion than solar or wind power, which will be as weak, diffuse and intermittent a thousand years from now as they are today."

We have right here in America over a thousand years’ supply of cheap clean natural gas energy.  Only the Democrats with their greenie and crony capitalist allies are in the way.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.