[Flash Walken]

Originally Posted by Husky

Not saying fracking will die down - saying that without export infrastructure AB is a one trick pony to the US and will forever have a large price discount on gas prices due to US constraint.

And this is part of a geopolitical strategy to impoverish other energy reliant states like Russia.

The US is all in on their own energy supply because it has crippled their major geopolitical foes.

There is basically nothing anyone will be able to do to resist that new reality.

From 2013:

ZUCKERMAN: Right now it's about 89 million barrels per day. And we, the United States, are responsible for production of about nine percent of that - about eight million barrels. And that's up since 2005, when we were at about five million barrels. We've added about four percent to the global supply of crude.

INSKEEP: That's a big deal.

ZUCKERMAN: It is. And at the margin, it's a really big deal. It's not to say people kind of say to me well, Greg, you wrote this book about the energy revolution, why aren't I paying a lot less at the pump? And I'm not sure we're going to be paying a lot less at the pump, but it's relative to what we would have to pay. Had this revolution not taken place we wouldn't have been able to do the kind of sanctions and boycotts of Iran that we've orchestrated and we would be paying a lot more. And so it has had an effect for consumers.

INSKEEP: Are you willing to argue that if the United States had not been able to boost its production of oil in the last several years that the global sanctions regime against Iran would be a lot weaker - would have fallen apart? There would be other countries that would say there's just not enough oil in the world, we need Iran's oil far more badly than you realize, America?

ZUCKERMAN: Yeah. I do think that the temptation to not participate in the sanctions of Iran would've been much greater had it not been for this fracking and energy revolution in the United States. It's not to say that we wouldn't have had partners and allies in the effort, but not everyone would've participated like they are today.

INSKEEP: You know, it's nice to be able to think that the United States would be less dependent on a frequently unstable region like the Middle East. But is that something of an illusion? Because it is a global market and if supplies from Saudi Arabia say, are disrupted or supplies from Iraq are disrupted, even if that oil wasn't going directly to the United States, it's going to affect oil prices in the United States.

ZUCKERMAN: That's exactly right. As long as we care about oil, we're going to care about the Middle East. But at the margin, it's going to give us a lot more flexibility. I really think that we are going to be less involved in the Middle East. And I really think countries like China are going to become more important and more involved in the Middle East. And frankly, the kind of military experts I talked to are still trying to figure out if that's a good thing or a bad thing. But either way we're going to be much less dependent on the Middle East and much less involved in the Middle East and energy is going to play a much bigger role.

Last year, Hillary Clinton, when she was Secretary of State, she created a dedicated energy bureau within the State Department, and she said energy is going to play a bigger role in future diplomacy, and I think that's really going to be the case.

http://www.npr.org/2013/11/14/245149...lital-leverage

From 2016:

Many have credited the fracking boom, which peaked in the last few years, with a new American independence. The thinking goes that with domestic production soaring, the U.S. is less dependent on other nations for energy supply and so less vulnerable to the demands and strife of oil-supplying countries.

For one, fracking has had an indirect hand in foreign policy. The Obama administration’s ability to impose sanctions on Iran in 2010 and 2011 can be linked back to the shale boom, according to Sam Ori, executive director at University of Chicago’s Energy Policy Institute. Ori spent several years at a Washington-based think tank focused on energy policy and national security and worked at the State Department prior to that.

“A big part of the reason why they [the Bush administration] didn’t ultimately impose really harsh sanctions on the oil industry is because they were concerned about what that would do to the oil market, the oil price and the global economy,” Ori said in an interview.

There was concern that the global market wouldn’t be able to compensate fast enough if Iranian fuel was taken off the market at that time.

“From an oil market standpoint, the shale boom really provided the flexibility to do that,” Ori explained.

Still, there is a problem with the energy independence argument. Fracking has boosted the rate at which oil and natural gas can be extracted from wells, but despite now being one of the world’s top exporters, the U.S. still imports huge amounts of oil and petroleum products.

The U.S. exported more oil than ever in 2015: 4,750,000 barrels a day, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That same year, the U.S. imported 9,401,000 barrels per day. When you compare that to 2005, the year with the highest imports in decades, at 13.7 million barrels a day, the difference is not as striking as you would expect, especially when U.S. exports for that year were only 1.2 million barrels a day.

http://nationalsecurityzone.medill.n...s-of-fracking/