"There can be no doubt that America is in the midst of an energy renaissance," says global energy guru Joseph Stanislaw, who now works with Deloitte. Soaring oil output from the Bakken Shale fields, coupled with increased deepwater output primarily from the Gulf of Mexico, has pushed up U.S. domestic oil production by 12% since 2008. This is the first increase in a quarter-century and has confounded predictions that domestic output was set on an inexorable downtrend.
America's potential oil and gas growth is so great, predicts Professor Amy Myers Jaffe of Rice University’s Baker Institute, that by the 2020s the capital of energy will likely have shifted back to the Western Hemisphere, where it was prior to the ascendancy of Middle Eastern mega-suppliers such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait in the 1960s. Statoil isn't the only national oil company horning in. After failing to land Unocal in 2005 amid political contretemps, China's Cnooc has put up $2 billion for joint ventures with Chesapeake Energy and another $2.1 billion to dig into Canada's oil sands. Sinopec has done a $2.5 billion shale JV with Devon Energy and bought Canada's Daylight Energy for $2.1 billion. Malaysia's Petronas is closing on a $5.35 billion takeover of Canada's Progress Energy. And Korea's KNOC invested more than $9 billion in U.S. finds. . .View Full Article
