Nick Grealy suggests shale gas cynics and pessimists such as Art Berman are latched onto by green ideologues as straws to be grasped in a last desperate struggle to forestall the change, but what cannot be stopped won’t be.

It’s been a theory of mine for a while that the industry should present the sudden emergence of shale gas and oil as a product not only of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, but also as a tech issue. That could be one way of raising people’s hopes and building excitement about, and confidence in, shale technology.

The industry quite rightly concentrates of lowering fears, but we need to raise hopes as well. Shale gas is both a negative and a positive disruption.

Combining the physical techniques of fracking and drilling with computing power only seen possible this century makes today’s shale gas and oil far more efficient -and productive. This, in turn, can make many of the concerns about both the surface impact of shale gas and its productive potential as outdated as Pentium computer chips.

We live in a time of rapid technological advances, but the energy industry has been one of the most consistently analog industries in a digital world. Energy has moved very slowly over time, but there is no reason to think it stops today. It’s perfectly possible that a combination of renewables far more efficient than today, energy storage, greater efficiency, an oil to gas transition in transportation and advances small scale nuclear will upend energy thinking again.

http://www.naturalgasnow.org/shale-gas-changing-everything-except-t...