America, oil power

Thank you, George P. Mitchell

“Freedom is the right to question and change the established way of doing things. It is the continuous revolution of the marketplace. It is the understanding that allows us to recognize shortcomings and seek solutions.”

—Ronald Reagan, talking to students at Moscow State University, May 31st, 1988.

GAS PRICES are plummeting like the bit of an oil drill, straight and true, through one geological layer after another and then suddenly taking a horizontal turn and affecting all the rest of the economy, not to mention every other aspect of American power, diplomacy and leadership in the world.

Remember the Energy Crisis, the inevitability of Peak Oil, and how the price of a barrel of oil would increase from here to eternity, never receding?

Recall how we would never break free of OPEC’s oligopoly with its ever tighter grip on the world’s oil supply? How doom and gloom were everywhere? In short, remember malaise and the Carter Years?

Now imagine the opposite. You don’t have to imagine it. Just look around and savor the moment—and all the moments, all the years, ahead for America the oil power.

Ronald Reagan, that cockeyed optimist, told us there’d be days like this if only we’d give the economy its head, let American entrepreneurs and innovators compete freely, forget wage-and-price controls, and watch the price of oil drop and American productivity rise. But who believed him?

Headlines like the one on the front page of Saturday’s paper would have been hard to envisage back then: “Utilities in state to lower gas bills/ Well prices drop, pare winter rates.”

If you doubt the steady diet of good news in your daily paper, just take a look at your natural gas bills starting this month. All three of the state’s natural gas companies have just filed lower rates with the state’s Public Service Commission:

Centerpoint’s customers are to pay 19 percent less than they did last year.

Arkansas Oklahoma Gas is to begin charging its customers 21 percent less come this winter.

SourceGas Arkansas, which serves some 160,000 customers across northern and Northwest Arkansas, is expected to start charging them 23 percent less a month in the future.

Everything is coming up savings, which means there’ll be more money for investment, and more jobs as the petroleum industry—and all those it fuels—grows along with the rest of the economy.

HOW DID all this happen? It’s hard to explain without mentioning the name of one George Phydias Mitchell, the Galveston-born son of Greek immigrants. He had a dream that went by the technical name of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing— or fracking for short. And he pursued it even after he was told his idea would never work. Yet he persisted, and so did his dream. Until finally, despite setback after setback, it has revolutionized the oil industry here and around the world.

It seems the only thing George Mitchell could not accept in his search for a better way to produce oil was defeat. First tested out in the Barnett Shale, his innovation would spread throughout the great Permian Basis in a kind of onetwo punch that has revived the great oil fields of West Texas—until Midland looks like the old days again, attracting job-seekers from all over the country. There are fortunes to be made again, dreams to pursue again. America, it turns out, is still America, God bless her.

We could get used to this kind of thing—from lower gas bills in Arkansas to boom times in Texas.

Thank you, George P. Mitchell, and all those who believed and invested in your American dream, and made it come true—for all of us. Who says America is finished? Despite all the naysayers who would saddle that dream with tighter regulations, and discourage the creation of more pipelines to get that liquid gold to more markets, and a thousand other ways to stifle freedom, we ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

This is still a young country reaching for the stars. And the ride has just begun.