Shale oil and gas boom puts global warming issue on the back burner

A technological revolution is transforming the world's energy landscape as we move from an expectation of shortages of oil and gas to a new era of abundance. The development of natural gas from shale, that has already taken off in the US, and a variety of technologies are creating new options for oil development, so much so that the notion of peak oil has vanished from the conversation.

We can expect some consequences. Chief among them is the fact that, as energy gets more abundant, the incentives to develop clean, renewable energy drop dramatically. As a result, we are no longer looking at an age of increasing solar, wind and nuclear power. We are moving into a renewed hydrocarbon era of oil and gas. That's very bad news for climate change.

The natural gas revolution is already playing out in the US. Only a few years ago, domestic gas supplies were running out, demand was rising, and prices were shooting up. The US was desperate to import foreign gas.

Fast-forward to today, and US companies are now trying to figure out how to convert import terminals into export facilities. What made tens of billions dollars' worth of infrastructure almost worthless, seemingly overnight? Shale gas.

The United States is well endowed with enormous deposits of shale rock - soft, but brittle rock that is dense with hydrocarbons. Sometimes the hydrocarbons take the form of oil, but mostly it is in the form of natural gas.

Over the last 30 years, the technology needed to break up those rocks to get at this gas has steadily advanced. As the techniques matured, and the price of gas rose, major energy companies moved aggressively to exploit these new fields. The result has been an explosion in natural gas production. It has led to an 80 per cent fall in gas prices and the complete collapse of the natural gas import business.