Underlying growing instability is the Egyptian state’s increasing inability to contain the devastating social impacts of interconnected energy, water and food crises over the last few decades.
.. In 1973, U.S. senator and oil expert Henry Jackson noted that Israel and the Shah’s Iran were “reliable friends of the United States” who, along with Saudi Arabia, “have served to inhibit and contain those irresponsible and radical elements in certain Arab states…who, were they free to do so, would pose a grave threat indeed to our principal source of petroleum in the Persian Gulf.”
The father of fracking
Yet Mr Mitchell’s story is more complicated than just a fable of hard work rewarded and a vision vindicated. It also shows how governments can help along the entrepreneurial spirit. His company counted on support from various government agencies, including those that mapped the shale reserves (demonstrating that they were plentiful) and promoted the development of technologies such as diamond-studded drill bits. Jimmy Carter’s 1980 law to tax “windfall profits” at oil firms also included a tax credit for drilling for unconventional natural gas.
.. In his later years he also campaigned for tight government regulation of fracking: he worried that the wild men who ran the independents might discredit his technique by cutting corners and damaging the environment.
Peak Oil: Yesterday’s fuel
We believe that they are wrong, and that oil is close to a peak. This is not the “peak oil” widely discussed several years ago, when several theorists, who have since gone strangely quiet, reckoned that supply would flatten and then fall. We believe that demand, not supply, could decline.