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Michael Graetz’s “The End of Energy” surveys 40 years of energy policy making. It isn’t pretty.

January 16, 2012

Michael Giberson

Michael J. Graetz, "The End of Energy." (Book cover)

Michael J. Graetz, "The End of Energy," MIT Press, 2011.

Michael Graetz’s The End of Energy is a fascinating run through 40 years of U.S. energy policy making. Engaging and at times even entertaining if you are at all interested in energy issues. In Graetz’s telling it is mostly a story of 40 years of failure, though he notes a few successes along the way.

I absolutely loved that the first chapter began with President Nixon’s decision to impose wage and price controls on August 15, 1971. If you think that wasn’t energy-policy relevant, then read that chapter (the publisher will let you read it free). Just note that the Arab oil embargo just over two years later caused barely a hiccup in U.S. oil imports; the gas lines and shortages were mostly due to the remaining Nixon oil price regulations. (Yet, 40 years later we still blame OPEC!)

Graetz proceeds to pull us through the swamp of 1970′s energy policy. President Ford joined Congress in giving us automobile fuel economy regulations. President Carter pushed an astounding range of proposals, succeeded on some but failed on others,  and lectured Americans for their supposed consumerist excesses. The book does a good job of surveying the problems created by interstate natural gas price regulation and the difficult politics of casting off that burden.

Reagan’s presidency doesn’t get much attention. Oil and gas price decontrol seemed to work, but these policies were initiated by Carter. After Reagan comes a decade and a half of relatively low energy prices, but for the spike around the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Not much to report, Graetz suggests, as the urge for new energy policy rises and falls with energy prices.

Energy prices pick up again in the mid-2000s, and after a few words on the Energy Policy Act of 1992 we find ourselves in the middle of climate change discussions and the massive difficulties that come with finding reasonable policy. Graetz devotes a late chapter to Congress and the attempted making of a cap-and-trade law. It is enough, perhaps, to turn the most die hard advocate of cap-and-trade into a carbon tax proponent (excepting that, had Waxman-Markey pushed a carbon tax, then a look into the sausage factory likely would have produced the opposite impulse). The book winds down contemplating the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the Obama administration’s efforts in response.

The book mostly covers domestic federal coal, oil and gas, environmental and some nuclear power issues. Relatively little attention goes to electric power beyond nuclear or to  international issues, except when discussing climate change politics. Not much on ethanol and just a little on solar and wind power. Still – coal, oil and gas, the environment – these are where the big money is and so that is where the politics have focused. One lesson of the book seems to be that lobbying expenditure is a product of policymaker ambition and the size of government, and not the other way around.

The hazard of writing a current events-type book is that the book must end even as events continue. So Graetz laments that 40 years of energy policy making hasn’t put a dent in our “energy dependence,” and practically at the same time we have begun importing less oil for the first time in decades. Domestic oil and gas production is up in recent years, and what is more, it is a development that has come about mostly without the attention of federal energy policy makers. (Or perhaps in part due to their lack of attention, even admitting some federal R&D support for oil and gas drilling technology.)

Well, we can’t blame Graetz because history continued after his book ended. It is a strength of his book that is gives us some idea of what to expect of the next few years, as the politicians and regulators in Washington DC begin to take notice of this domestic energy development. I wouldn’t score all of the wins and losses quite the way he does, and I’m not sure where his interest in more grand energy policy comes from given the fairly damning assessment of the federal energy policy system. Still, the book offers its readers a fair view of and deeper insight into the last 40 years of federal energy policy.

Posted in Economic history, Energy markets, Environmental policy, Politics, Regulation | 2 Comments »

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Does a public good argument justify subsidizing private energy production?

December 21, 2011

Michael Giberson

Yesterday I disputed the analysis by which the Breakthough Institute wanted to claim credit on behalf of the federal government for the shale gas boom; today I dispute their claimed broader implications for federal energy R&D policy.

Late in their op-ed, the Breakthrough folks shift emphasis from a narrow drilling technology story to a broader examination of energy R&D policy:

Giving the federal government credit where it is due takes nothing away from Mitchell, who was determined and tenacious. But the lesson of the shale gas revolution is that we should not be so quick to judge government investments in energy technology. Between 1978 and 2007, the Energy Department spent $24 billion on fossil energy research. Billions more were spent through the Gas Research Institute and non-conventional gas tax credits. Those investments were widely panned as a failure during the ’80s and early ’90s, when gas was plentiful and cheap.

Whatever one thinks about shale gas today — we worry about its environmental consequences — there’s no denying the extraordinary economic return on taxpayer investments.

This last point is interesting, but undeveloped in the article. If one were to calculate the “economic return on taxpayer investments,” would one have to conclude they were extraordinary?

The essay ultimately wants to argue against claims that the Solyndra episode proves governments can’t pick winners and the shale gas boom proves private enterprise can. Defenders of subsidies for solar power projects claim critics are too focused on a single failure, Solyndra, when reasonably critics should be assessing the overall portfolio of projects supported. It is a fair observation, but it may turn against their conclusion. If we are to consider the return on “taxpayer investments” in energy R&D, we’d reasonably need to survey the full portfolio of energy technology concepts funded by the federal government. We’d have to count the winners and losers both, based on the best current understanding, and again (as yesterday) we’d want to work out some idea of what would have happened in the energy technology space without federal government intervention. Further, we wouldn’t just worry about the environmental consequences, we’d have to compute some estimate of the costs and include it in the analysis.

The article goes nowhere close to presenting the relevant case. Near the end of the article they claim federal credit for “nuclear power, natural gas turbines, solar panels, and wind turbines — pretty much every significant energy technology since World War II.” Hmmm, notice they don’t mention the other big selectively-cited-by-critics failure: the Carter-era launch of an$88 billion effort to make oil from coal. Like the Solyndra and Synfuels Corp. complainers, the Breakthrough Institute wants to draw policy implications for an uncertain future based on a selective invocation of history.

It is further a kind of mistake to invoke Solyndra in an essay all about energy R&D policy. Much recent taxpayer-extracted support for energy shows up in the production tax credit, the investment tax credits, the Section 1603 Treasury grants and miscellaneous other subsidies that are directed to help promote the fortunes of companies building renewable power components or producing power via renewable sources. While some of these companies are pursuing technological developments, these subsidies are not tied to research in any substantial way and yield very little in the way of publicly available research results. Try gathering detailed data on production from a wind farm or solar power plant benefiting from millions of dollars in taxpayer-supported subsidies – their lawyers will likely tell you it is commercially-sensitive information and not publicly available. And by the way it isn’t just renewable energy, the lawyers for subsidized production from low-output oil and gas wells will likely say the same thing.

There is a respectable public good argument that can be made in support of subsidizing at least some research. The “extraordinary economic return” that the Breakthrough Institute wants to claim on behalf of government subsidized research into oil and gas drilling technology is this kind of an argument. If Breakthrough wants to drag Solyndra and the full range of energy production subsidies into this argument, an economist looking for a respectable public good argument has got to ask: where is the public good in subsidizing private energy production from projects that hide publicly useful information from public review?

Posted in Economic history, Economics, Energy markets, Technology | Tagged , , | Comments Off

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Did the federal government invent the shale gas boom?

December 20, 2011

Michael Giberson

In the Washington Post the folks at the Breakthrough Institute try to learn us some history about the shale gas boom. Maybe you think the shale gas boom was some big surprise suddenly made real after the decades-long work of a hard-headed oil and gas guy – George Mitchell – willing to spend millions of dollars on the crazy idea that hydrocarbons stuck in a rock could be produced economically, once the right mix of technologies could be brought to bear.

Wrong, says the Breakthrough Institute, credit the shale gas boom to the federal government.

They have their reasons:

  • “Slick-water fracking, the technology that Mitchell used to crack the shale gas code, was adapted from massive hydraulic fracturing, a technology first demonstrated by the Energy Department in 1977.”
  • “Mitchell learned of shale’s potential from the Eastern Gas Shales Project, a partnership begun in 1976 between the Energy Department’s Morgantown Energy Research Center and dozens of companies and universities ….”
  • “Mitchell’s success depended on a revolution in monitoring and mapping technologies driven largely by government labs.”
  • In 1991, Mitchell asked the publicly funded Gas Research Institute, then funded by a tax on gas production, and the Energy Department for help.”
  • “Sandia National Labs provided Mitchell with many critical microseismic tools.”
  • “Mitchell also benefited from 3-D imaging, which the Energy Department had long supported.”
  • “The third critical technology was horizontal drilling and well installation …. In 1976, two government engineers … patented an early-stage directional drilling technology that became the precursor to horizontal drilling.”
  • “A joint venture between the Energy Department and industry drilled the first horizontal Devonian shale well….

There are a few more similar points. The article pursues a larger goal – some statement concerning current energy policy support – but today I just want to consider how to assess the credit for technological advancement. (See tomorrow for part II.)

A fair analysis of credit and blame requires more than just a recounting of history, such as provided in the article, we need also to construct a counterfactual history for comparison. Should we reasonably believe that but-for the energy technology programs of the Department of Energy, we’d be unable to produce natural gas from shale? It would be difficult to do this analysis well, and the authors don’t attempt it here, but a full assessment calls for it.

A sketch of technology developments may be helpful. Note that fracturing as a well-stimulation technology started in Pennsylvania in the early 1860s. A few clever folk discovered dropping gunpowder down a well, later liquid nitroglycerin,  often brought marvelous returns. Edward A. L. Roberts submitted a patent application for the process in 1864. Hydraulic fracturing technology was first developed by Standard Oil (Indiana) in the late 1940s.  In the 1960s, Project Gasbuggy had the federal government collaborating with the oil and gas industry to test a nuclear-weapon based fracturing technology on federal land in New Mexico. The Breakthrough Institute’s story picks up in the 1970s, but what the backstory reveals is a history of efforts to develop fracturing technology, funded privately in some cases and publicly in others. Department of Energy involvement may have shaped the direction of research, but I suspect its pool of research funds was merely convenient to technological advancement and not necessary. (More recently, GasFrac Energy Services of Alberta has pioneered a propane-based fracturing technology.)

Directional drilling, a precursor to horizontal drilling, first became practiced in the industry in the 1920s – well before “two government engineers … patented an early-stage directional drilling technology” in 1976. (See “Slanted Oil Wells,” published in Popular Science magazine in 1931.) As with hydraulic fracturing,  the industry found the technology quite useful in application and companies pursued technological advancements. Taxpayer funding may have been convenient support for the oil and gas industry, government research involvement may have shaped the direction of directional-drilling research, but the industry would have pursued the technology in any case.

So possibly the federal government’s involvement advanced by a few years the technologies that were finally blended in a sufficiently promising mix by George Mitchell. Even if we grant as much, it isn’t the whole of the shale gas boom that federal involvement gains credit for, just the added value that comes from shifting shale gas production forward by a few years. Of course possibly the whole of the federal government’s involvement in the industry – tax policies, regulatory policies, antitrust policies, federal lands policy, and so on – could reasonably be counted as delaying technological advancement when compared against what would have happened under some more rational regime.

Admittedly, they were just writing an op-ed and I’m complaining that they didn’t do a dissertation’s worth of work to support it. Maybe my complaints are a little unfair.

Okay, here is an offer: I’ll admit my complaints are unfair if they admit that their analysis was insufficient to justify their conclusions.

Posted in Economic history, Economics, Technology | Tagged , , , | 20 Comments »

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Why did water utilities in the U.S. become mostly publicly owned?

October 28, 2011

Michael Giberson

Among U.S. water utilities, some are publicly owned and some are privately owned. Same thing for gas utilities and electric utilities. But unlike in the gas and electric power industries, the water business has become predominantly organized by publicly-owned utilities. Scott Masten explores why it was that public utility ownership became dominant among water utilities in an article, “Public Utility Ownership in 19th-Century America: The ‘Aberrant’ Case of Water,”  appearing in the October 2011 issue of the Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization.

I would have guessed that the large up-front costs with low salvage value (termed “relationship-specific assets”) created a large potential for post-investment opportunism (i.e., like the “competition over infra-marginal rents” story that John Neufeld says help explain the rise of state electric power regulation). After all, seems like there are few better examples of sunk costs than the networks of underground pipes that make up a municipal water supply system.

Masten discusses the idea that relationship-specific asset related problems favored municipalization, but finds no evidence in his data to suggest that water utilities will larger investments were more likely to be publicly owned. And yet his favored explanation is related: he finds strong support for the idea that frictions between city governments and private water utilities was a key contributor to municipalization. Friction was often over city-demanded expansions that were resisted by private water utilities, mostly because contracts negotiated between cities and private utilities didn’t provide efficient incentives for expansions and occasionally cities reneged on promised subsidy arrangements to induce expansion. This is, as Masten explains at pp. 621-625, is a fight over infra-marginal rents, so I’m not sure why Masten favors a “relational friction” story over a “relationship-specific assets” story. In any case public ownership, by integrating city and water utility, eliminates the costly conflict that would otherwise undermine the efficiency of private operations.

While his data and analysis mostly revolve around the late 19th century, he notes the issue is of more than historical interest. From the conclusion (notes omitted):

The World Bank has recently been actively studying privatization of waterworks as a way of addressing severe water problems in developing countries.The dominance of public ownership of water and sanitation services in the United States should, at a minimum, give policymakers pause: If, despite an institutional environment conducive to private ownership, American water and sanitation systems are overwhelmingly publicly owned and operated, is it reasonable to expect privatization to yield long-term gains in developing countries where the environment for private enterprise may be much less hospitable? Understanding the determinants of variations in waterworks ownership both over time and between communities may help inform whether privatization of water systems in developing countries makes sense .

Public ownership does eliminate costly fighting between city and private utility over infra-marginal rents, but it doesn’t eliminate the rents and so likely won’t eliminate the competition to capture them. Masten’s suggestion for further research are useful, but also needed are complementary studies of the efficiency of publicly owned water utilities in countries “where the environment for private enterprise may be much less hospitable.” The question in terms of generalized economic growth seems to be under which system are more of the rents yielded to consumers.

Masten’s abstract:

Unlike other public utilities, most water in the United States is supplied by publicly owned and operated waterworks. The predominance of the public sector in the supply of water was not always the case, however; private firms dominated US water supply throughout most of the 19th century. This article analyzes the puzzle of why water and sanitation systems were the only major utilities to become predominantly public by, first, reexamining historical accounts of the problems of contracting for water services in light of modern theories of economic organization and, then, evaluating hypotheses derived from those accounts using data on 373 waterworks serving US municipalities with populations over 10,000 in 1890. Among other results, municipal ownership is found to be related to the distribution of population and commerce within a city in ways that suggest that frictions between cities and private companies over system extensions and improvements played a significant role in the shift to municipal ownership.

Posted in Economic history, Economics, Electricity | Tagged , | 2 Comments »

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Boulton & Watt on new £50 note

October 7, 2011

Lynne Kiesling

Industrial revolutionaries, rejoice! The Bank of England is honoring one of the most fruitful and enterprising inventor-entrepreneur partnerships in economic history, Matthew Boulton and James Watt, by putting their images on the new £50 note.

You are probably familiar with James Watt as the inventor of the double-acting steam engine and other accompanying improvements that enabled mechanization and the ultimate replacement of animate, water, and wind power for the industrial transformations of the 19th century. Watt’s hard work and vision created a power source that enabled a dramatic increase in productivity, innovation, living standards, and transformational economic growth.

But Watt was also an irascible inventor who did not relish the customer-facing aspect of commercializing his inventions, which was where Matthew Boulton came in. Boulton’s background in manufacturing metal products, combined with his business sense and his “people skills”, made the partnership of Boulton and Watt a commercial success and the firm of Boulton & Watt one of the most profitable and influential pioneers of mechanization and industrialization. They truly changed the world for the better.

HT: Boing Boing

Posted in Economic history | Comments Off

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Smil’s brief list of the pioneering creators of electric systems

October 5, 2011

Michael Giberson

In the process of explaining why Steve Jobs, though talented, is no Thomas Edison, Vaclav Smil name-drops a “brief list of the pioneering creators of electric systems”:

This fundamental innovation [the electric power system] was created during a remarkably short period of time—most of it between the late 1870s and the beginning of the 20th century—by a surprisingly small number of inventors, engineers, and scientists. In order to avoid the most obvious exclusionary injustice, even a brief list of the pioneering creators of electric systems must include the names of Charles Clarke, Sebastian Ferranti, Lucien Gaulard, John Gibbs, Zénobe-Théophile Gramme, Edward Johnson, Irving Langmuir, Charles Parsons, Emil Rathenau, Werner Siemens, William Stanley, Charles Steinmetz, Joseph Swan, Nikola Tesla, Elihu Thomson, Francis Upton, and George Westinghouse. But, justly, one name stands above them all, that of Thomas Alva Edison.

I thought I knew a bit about this period, but I credit myself for recognizing only 6 of the 18 names mentioned (Siemens, Swan, Tesla, Thomson, Westinghouse, and Edison).

How well do you know your early electric power industry history?

Posted in Economic history, Electricity | 3 Comments »

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Yergin on oil, II

September 19, 2011

Michael Giberson

I second Lynne’s recommendation of Yergin’s column in the Saturday Wall Street Journal.

On the topic of Hubbert’s peak and peak oil generally, I particularly recommend these two paragraphs:

Hubbert insisted that price didn’t matter. Economics—the forces of supply and demand—were, he maintained, irrelevant to the finite physical cache of oil in the earth. But why would price—with all the messages that it sends to people about allocating resources and developing new technologies—apply in so many other realms but not in oil and gas production? Activity goes up when prices go up; activity goes down when prices go down. Higher prices stimulate innovation and encourage people to figure out ingenious new ways to increase supply.

The idea of “proved reserves” of oil isn’t just a physical concept, accounting for a fixed amount in the “storehouse.” It’s also an economic concept: how much can be recovered at prevailing prices. And it’s a technological concept, because advances in technology take resources that were not physically accessible and turn them into recoverable reserves.

Yergin’s proposed alternative to thinking in terms of “peak oil” is to think in terms of a plateau in production, you might call it a long-drawn out peak, which will be limited more by price and demand than by exhaustion of supplies.

The WSJ article is accompanied by a 20-minute video interview, mostly about Yergin’s new book, The Quest, to hit the stores tomorrow.

Posted in Economic history, Energy markets, Politics, Technology | Tagged , , | 2 Comments »

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AT&T’s history in a nutshell

September 15, 2011

Lynne Kiesling

The DOJ challenge to the AT&T/T-Mobile merger is bringing AT&T to our attention in ways that it hasn’t been in a while, including this great Ars Technica blog post providing a concise guide to the history of AT&T. Matthew Lasar argues that AT&T conquered the 20th century through patents, strategic acquisition, and embracing regulation and using it to its advantage. By so doing it did provide universal telephone access as it consolidated and cemented its monopoly, although some of its ways of using regulation to its advantage proved to be its undoing in the 1982 divestiture.

A highly recommended read, especially if you are not particularly familiar with the history of the telephone industry. That history provides important context for understanding current competition policy issues and events.

Posted in Economic history, Telecom | Comments Off

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The industrial revolution required more energy resources than provided by the annual cycle of photosynthesis

August 24, 2011

Michael Giberson

Tony Wrigley’s new book is Energy and the English Industrial Revolution. He provides some flavor of the fundamental thesis of the book in a post at VoxEU.org: “Opening Pandora’s box: A new look at the industrial revolution“:

The most fundamental defining feature of the industrial revolution was that it made possible exponential economic growth – growth at a speed that implied the doubling of output every half-century or less. This in turn radically transformed living standards. Each generation came to have a confident expectation that they would be substantially better off than their parents or grandparents. Yet, remarkably, the best informed and most perspicacious of contemporaries were not merely unconscious of the implications of the changes which were taking place about them but firmly dismissed the possibility of such a transformation. The classical economists Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, and David Ricardo advanced an excellent reason for dismissing the possibility of prolonged growth.

…

Photosynthesis was the source of mechanical energy which came predominantly from human and animal muscle power derived from food and fodder. Wind and water power were of comparatively minor importance. Photosynthesis was also the source of all heat energy used in production processes since the heat came from burning wood.

The implications of this situation in limiting productive potential are clear and dire. The land constraint was a severe impediment to growth. It is epitomised in a phrase of Sir Thomas More. He remarked that sheep were eating up men. An expansion of wool production meant less land available to grow food crops. Or again, it is easy to show that, if iron smelting had continued to depend upon charcoal, a rise in the production of iron to the scale which became normal in the mid-nineteenth century would have involved covering the entire land surface of Britain with woodland.

Breaking free from photosynthesis

Access to energy that did not spring from the annual product of plant photosynthesis was a sine qua non for breaking free from the constraints afflicting all organic economies. By an intriguing paradox, this came about by gaining access to the products of photosynthesis stockpiled over a geological time span. It was the steadily increasing use of coal as an energy source which provided the escape route.

Much more at VoxEU.

Posted in Economic history, Economics | Tagged , | Comments Off

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Devon Energy’s bet on Barnett Shale, made 10 years ago, has paid off

August 15, 2011

Michael Giberson

Yesterday, August 14, 2011, was the ten-year anniversary of the announcement by Oklahoma City-based Devon Energy of its intention to acquire Houston-based Mitchell Energy and Development for $3.5 billion. The prime target of interest lay about halfway between the two company headquarters, in the Barnett Shale surrounding Fort Worth, Texas. Mitchell had figured out how to use hydraulic fracturing to produce gas from shale formations, and was beginning to add horizontal drilling to its mix.

As Jack Smith explains in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram‘s Barnett Shale blog:

At the time, it had drilled about 400 wells in the Barnett, and executives saw the potential for 1,200.

But over the decade, Devon would advance the ball significantly with improved horizontal drilling and an expansion of drilling far beyond areas north of Fort Worth where Mitchell Energy had focused. The result would be a drilling boom that by 2008 would draw numerous rivals into the field and make the Barnett the biggest gas-producing area in the U.S. Tarrant and Johnson counties would emerge as the top two gas-producing counties in Texas.

Contrary to reports by some people that shale gas production is economically doomed, Devon says things are looking up:

In the Barnett, “our drilling costs are down, our production is up and our efficiencies are increasing,” said Brad Foster, senior vice president of Devon’s Central Division, which includes Barnett operations.

Devon has achieved, or is on the verge of, several Barnett milestones:

It posted record production in this year’s second quarter, averaging the equivalent of 1.28 billion cubic feet of gas per day, even while keeping only 12 drilling rigs busy. That’s less than a third as many as it ran in 2008, before gas prices cratered.

Devon’s total Barnett production since the Mitchell acquisition is expected to hit the equivalent of 3 trillion cubic feet by year’s end, spokesman Chip Minty said. It’s at 2.8 trillion now.

Despite weak gas prices, now about $4 per 1,000 cubic feet, Devon is realizing solid returns from the Barnett because “our ability to drill wells economically just gets better every year,” said Chairman Larry Nichols, who was CEO during the Mitchell acquisition.

The story continues with some details that help make sense of various claims made by the industry. On the one hand the industry claims that hydraulic fracturing is an old, frequently-used technology that has been time-tested and proved safe. On the other hand, companies assert they are rapidly improving methods to cut cost and need trade secret protections for their hydraulic fracturing fluids.

The truth is hydraulic fracturing has been around for a long time, but its combination with horizontal drilling techniques and application in development of oil and gas from shale is much more recent. As the immense economic potential of shale-based production has become clear, many companies have sought out ways to do the job better.

More from Smith:

When Devon began drilling in the Barnett in 2002, it took three to six weeks to drill a single horizontal well, said David Fortenberry, Devon vice president of technology.

“The rigs we used were really too small and underpowered for horizontal wells,” he said.

Now, with higher-efficiency rigs and much more experience, Devon averages only about 12 days to drill a Barnett well, and “we’ve actually drilled some wells down in southwest Johnson County in about six days,” Foster said.

Drilling-rig design “has improved dramatically in the past 10 years,” with rigs now “ideally suited to drill these horizontal wells,” Nichols said.

Devon uses a “walking rig” device to scoot a 156-foot-high rig between surface well bores at its southwest Tarrant pad site. If well bores are 20 feet apart, the rig can move that far in just an hour. Without the walking device, it could take two days to disassemble a rig and set it up 20 feet away.

The Barnett wells that Devon has drilled this year have provided “some of the best results we’ve ever gotten,” Nichols said.

…

Ample supplies from dramatic increases in U.S. shale-gas production have kept prices low, as the industry has become “in part … a victim of our own success,” Nichols said.

Devon has dropped to 12 drilling rigs because it can keep production at least flat at that level of activity and because “at this time, the country just doesn’t need any more natural gas,” Nichols said.

Production declines have been lower than expected in Barnett wells, he said. There will be “steep declines in the first year, but it flattens out a lot sooner than we originally thought” — often after 12 to 18 months of production, he said.

Natural gas consumers are not complaining. Even while oil prices have moved much higher post-2008, domestic U.S. natural gas prices remain held in the $4 to 5 MMBtu range. And with natural gas prices playing a significant role in competitive wholesale power prices, electric consumers are seeing some benefits, too.


ALSO: Another good story on Devon’s acquisition of Mitchell and development in the Barnett Shale appeared in The Oklahoman yesterday.

Posted in Economic history, Energy markets, Technology | Tagged , | Comments Off

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