North America is heading towards a new independence day; the day in the not too distant future when it will once again be self-sufficient in oil and natural gas supplies.
In the 1960’s the US congress had laws against dependency on foreign oil supplies. As these laws were relaxed and restrictions were introduced on drilling on state owned lands the US became dependant on oil from the Middle East and suffered from the inevitable geopolitical fall out.
Shale gas, shale oil and oil shale have changed all that. New extraction techniques have made the US self-sufficient in gas, confounding predictions that the US would have to import LPG (liquid petroleum gas) from abroad and making the coastal gas terminals (built in anticipation of this requirement) redundant.
Natural gas in the US is around $3 per million BTUs in Europe that is $11 and in Pacific East Asia the price is $15. The numbers speak for themselves.
With Canadian tar sands and Mexican deep water oil production, North America can bask in a new found energy security while Europe are looking at increased dependency on Russian Gas and Middle Eastern oil. Both regions will not hesitate to extract every last ounce of political leverage from their energy strangle hold.
Watch out for a resurgent US and diminishing European Union and a new “New World Order”.
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