As I keep saying, shale gas is indeed revolutionising world energy supply.
The US Energy Information Administration officially uses the word `vast’ for shale gas resources outside the US:
Although the shale gas resource estimates will likely change over time as additional information becomes available, the report shows that the international shale gas resource base is vast
Remember that, according to IHS CERA, shale gas is proving cheap, whereas shale oil is generally expensive.
Why is so little of this story in the mainstream media?
Ah, because they are too interested in last decade’s story still: I thought this was nicely put (by Peter Foster):
This week, U.S. climate envoy Todd Stern acknowledged at the latest cast-of-thousands climate talks in Bangkok that a binding global agreement on emissions is “not doable.” The talks have meanwhile been reduced to their shakedown basics: US$100-billion of “climate aid” to countries that are poor because they have lousy governments. This money would be laundered via the terminally corrupt United Nations, the same organization that orchestrated the cooking of the science.
On Tuesday, the International Energy Agency, the IEA, in a report on “progress” in alternative energy, in fact revealed that such energy is all but irrelevant. Almost half of the increase in primary energy use in the past decade has come from coal. Almost all the rest has come from oil and gas. Last November, the IEA’s World Energy Outlook signalled – reluctantly – that political commitments to slash fossil fuel use were so much hot air.
Peak oil theorists and other Malthusian moralists are – as ever – being made to look ridiculous. Private-sector ingenuity has most recently upset the depletionists in orchestrating a shale gas revolution, which promises hundreds of years of additional supply. The IEA’s chief economist, Fatih Birol, admitted earlier this year that shale gas would further undermine wind and solar. Meanwhile, other recent studies have suggested that improving technology may soon unlock the vast resource of shale oil.