Hardly a day goes by without somebody in government or the big liberal media complaining about all the jobs that U.S. corporations have moved overseas, or lamenting the loss of the American heartland’s once mighty industrial capacity. Lost amid all the shouting and cursing is this fact: Thanks to recent advances in drilling technology, especially the use of hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” and horizontal drilling, this nation stands on the threshold of an incredible industrial renaissance powered by the availability of immense supplies of affordable natural gas and oil harvested from the continental United States and its offshore dominions. Fracking and horizontal drilling allow energy companies to tap into billions of barrels and trillions of cubic feet of previously inaccessible oil and natural gas trapped in shale and other formations thousands of feet below the Earth’s surface and separated from the water table by immense expanses of solid rock. Fracking has been used to drill more than a million wells in this country, and in the past decade has found new prominence with discovery of major oil and gas deposits in West Texas, Pennsylvania, Louisiana and New York. In addition, ExxonMobil just announced a huge new find in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
These abundant, affordable energy supplies could revitalize domestic manufacturing in countless ways. As Nucor Steel CEO Dan Dimicco recently told the Wall Street Journal, the potential is so immense that “we could change the entire manufacturing base in the U.S. if we just embrace what’s happening in natural gas.” Plentiful, affordable energy supplies are a key factor in attracting new manufacturing investments in the U.S. that will create thousands of jobs, bring back many that are now overseas, and generate the growth so desperately needed to get the American economy humming again.
