shale oil
Oil price smackdown—the case for and against higher oil prices
Depending on who you listen to, oil prices are either about to crash again, or soar much higher. Here’s how all the arguments stack up.
Good-bye to the North American oil market as we knew it
Things will never be the same, writes Andrew Leach
Forget the Keystone XL. It doesn’t matter (all that much) anymore.
The Northern Gateway, on the other hand…
It’s not ‘fracking!’ We call it ‘deep earth massage’
Alberta made a cameo on the justly popular Language Log linguistics website last week. U of Calgary prof Julie Sedivy signed in to discuss some survey evidence from Louisiana that public resistance to “fracking” (i.e., hydraulic fracturing, a method of extracting oil and gas more efficiently by injecting high-pressure sand, water, and sometimes other chemicals into wells) may result, in part, just from the unpleasantness of the word. The industry tends to use “frac” as an adjective; “fracking” as a verb is a media creation, though, it must be said, not really an unsuitable one. Hydraulic fracturing is intended in part to crack up petroleum-bearing rock strata, so there’s an onomatopoeic appropriateness there.