After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the rise of China and the Arab Spring, American energy independence looks likely to trigger the next great geopolitical shift in the modern world.
US reliance on the Persian Gulf for its oil — and its consequent need to maintain a dominant presence in the Middle East to keep the oil flowing — has been one of the constants of the post-1945 status quo. That could be turned on its head.
It’s been dubbed “the homecoming.” After decades in which the hollowing out of American manufacturing has been chronicled in Bruce Springsteen’s blue-collar laments, cheap energy is being seen as the dawn of a new golden age for the world’s biggest economy.
Reuters
Oil workers in North Dakota are part of a boom that will make the US the biggest supplier of oil and gas.
The reason is simple. The US is the home to vast shale-oil and gas deposits made commercially viable by improvements to a 200-year-old technique called fracking and by the relentlessly high cost of crude.
Exploitation of fields in states such as West Virginia and Pennsylvania, and further west in North Dakota, have transformed the US’s energy outlook pretty much overnight. Professor Dieter Helm, an energy expert at Oxford University in the UK, said: “In the US, shale gas didn’t exist in 2004. Now it represents 30% of the market.”
If all the known shale gas resources were developed to their commercial potential in North America and other new fields, production could more than quadruple over the next two decades, according to recent study by the Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center. Pennsylvania — where the first oil well was drilled in 1859 — produced about 1 billion cubic feet of natural gas in 2008. By 2010, the state was producing 11 billion cubic meters, helping to put the US on course to be the world’s biggest supplier of oil and gas within a decade.
President Obama noted in this year’s State of the Union speech that fracking was likely to support 600,000 jobs by the end of the decade and that the US now had enough gas to keep it supplied for the next 100 years if current consumption patterns were maintained.
REGIME STRESS
Long-term consequences for the rest of the world are hard to predict, but it is probably safe to say that many of the regimes whose global role rests on hydrocarbons alone are likely to be significantly weakened, if not swept away.
That includes the monarchies that have thus far withstood the Arab Spring. Their persistence has depended on a historically high oil price and western backing. Both those conditions are now in question.
Shashank Joshi, a fellow of the Royal United Services Institute, said: “The Gulf Arab political order for almost the entire postwar period has depended on US interest in the region.
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