Representatives from Mr. Pyle, President of the Institute for Energy Research, recently reached out to me in an effort to set the record straight on natural gas extraction. Recently, the Los Angeles Times ran an op-ed that was chockfull of scare tactics, false analysis, and misrepresentations about the science and methods behind natural gas extractions. In fact, the op-ed was so misleading it caught the attention of Mr. Pyle himself. Big Journalism is where he turned to help set the record straight.

Consider these bullets before reading the rebuttal by Mr. Pyle.

• A current estimate of natural gas in America is 2,047 trillion cubic feet (enough to power our nation for the next 100 years).
• Congressional Research Service claimed that America’s supply of recoverable natural gas, oil, and coal is the largest on the planet.

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For those of you who missed it, The New York Times recently ran some controversial, front-page stories regarding the natural gas industry.  Specifically, some are questioning whether or not this was an agenda driven hit piece on the gas industry.

Ken Boehm, of the National Legal and Policy Center, has called for an investigation into the matter where he lays out what the issues are:

I write to request a formal inquiry by the Public Editor into a series of articles published last week in The New York Times about the natural gas industry and the investment banking world.  In the “Drilling Down” series, Ian Urbina alleges that there is a speculative bubble in the shale gas industry, “in much the same way that insiders have raised doubts about previous financial bubbles.”  But at least two of the sources for his articles are not industry insiders at all.  Rather they appear to be two individuals whose agenda is to publicly disparage the shale gas industry’s image and outlook.

The accusation sounds soft at first, but harsh words followed:

I am concerned that the Times, in a serious breach of long-established journalist   standards, ignored, concealed, or was misled regarding the conflicts of some of its key sources.

Not using industry sources to support this series would be oversight enough, but Boehm had a specific person in mind.

In fact, however, the likely source of some of these emails is Arthur Berman of Labyrinth Consulting Services in Sugar Land, Texas, who does not work for the shale gas drilling industry.  As Mr. Urbina acknowledges at one point in the June 25 story, Arthur Berman is actually “one of the most vocal skeptics of shale gas economics.”  Yet the Urbina stories do not disclose that Mr. Berman is much more than that.  He is the creator and leading popularizer of the shale gas “bubble” critique embraced by Mr. Urbina, and seems to have been his main source.  Perhaps most egregiously, the Urbana stories also neglect to mention that Arthur Berman makes his living providing investment advice based upon his own position as a shale gas critic.^[1]

Compelling to say the least.

After growing pressure from a chorus of critics, reports began appearing that NYT editors were mounting a vigorous defense in response to Boehm’s request. In fact, New York Magazine reported that Rick Berke, national editor of the NYT, sent “an internal memo defending the gas investigation.”  New York Magazine provided excerpts of the “surprisingly detailed” letter to NYT Public Editor Arthur Brisbane:

The terms that have attracted the most attention — ‘ponzi scheme’, comparisons to Enron, ‘dot-com bubble’ — are not terms that the Times itself used,” Berke wrote to Brisbane. “These terms come directly from internal emails that were written by industry officials, market analysts, and others. So that readers could judge the context of these comments, the Times published the emails themselves. The emails are indeed striking in their bluntness. Some of the authors of the emails say they have been ’sounding the alarm bells’ about what they see as serious issues that are being ignored. We were further careful to add calibration and qualification language about the emails.”

Either Berke is actively trying to not understand the point of the concerns, or he’s doing the written version of placing his hands on his ears and humming an annoying song.

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During his State of the Union address, President Obama tossed a couple of sops to popular opinion, promising to support: A) nuclear power, and B) offshore drilling. James Hudnall did a brilliant job of dismantling Obama’s atomic promises, pointing out that even if the President happened to be uncharacteristically sincere in this case, no new nuclear plant will be built in a dog’s lifetime, even if the pooch happens to one of those little yip-dogs that seem to live forever. Based on what we have seen of his administration so far, the same is true of Obama’s newfound commitment to offshore drilling.

Suspending reality for a moment, let’s assume that burning fossil fuels will indeed result in catastrophic climate change. According to the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, “we can’t drill our way out” of this supposed problem.

Actually, we can.

Burning natural gas is a much less intensive carbon intensive way of generating energy than burning any other fossil fuel. There are a couple of reasons for this. When you burn coal, just about all of the energy generated comes from turning carbon into carbon dioxide (a chemical reaction that releases heat). When you burn natural gas, the energy comes from two reactions: one that turns carbon into carbon dioxide, and another that turns hydrogen in water. Thus, from the start, natural gas generates less greenhouse gases for the same amount of energy produced. (more…)