Drill, Ye Tarriers, Drill!: Drilling Performance

When I was growing up, our family played a lot of music on our then high-fidelity Rek-O-Kut turntable. One of my favorite albums was by The Weavers, a folk group popular in the 1950s and early 1960s. Their version of “Drill, Ye Tarriers, Drill,” an American folk song first published in 1888, was terrific and I played it until the record wore out.

Tarriers were Irish-American workers who drilled and blasted holes in rock to make railroad tunnels, but the song seems strangely apropos today. If you haven’t noticed, there’s an oil and gas drilling boom going on the U.S. and it’s one of those “under the radar” stories that is transforming our economy.

Previously inaccessible oil and natural gas can be extracted with new horizontal drilling, or “fracking,” technology. This has led to oil and gas extraction on a grand scale throughout the U.S. As a result, in 2011 the U.S. became a net exporter of petroleum products for the first time in 62 years. New production helped reduce U.S. imports of crude oil by about 10 percent from 2005 to 2011.

Natural gas, now available domestically in large quantities and at low prices, is rippling through the economy. Jobs are being created in exploration and drilling; old, dirty coal-fired power plants are finally being shut down in favor of new natural gas-powered turbines; truck fleets are being converted to run on natural gas; and pharmaceutical manufacturing firms that depend on the ethane in natural gas are moving some production back to the U.S.

States near the Marcellus Shale, a huge natural gas formation centered in Pennsylvania, are feverishly pursuing a $4 billion ethane “cracker” to be built by Royal Dutch Shell. The cracker will process ethane-rich gas from the Marcellus Shale into ethylene, and the ethylene will be used by the pharmaceutical, chemical and plastics industries. The plant will create 10,000 construction jobs and several hundred permanent jobs.

“The oil sector is the key to the energy sector, and the energy sector is, I would argue, certainly one of the keys to the financial positioning of the economy for the United States,” said Thomas Petrie, vice chairman of Bank of America Merrill Lynch, as reported in Tulsa World. Petrie spoke at the University of Tulsa about global petroleum prospects. “This is not the end of the oil age. … If anything, it’s the beginning of the new oil age,” he said. Technology has “drastically improved” the supply availability of hydrocarbons in North America.