It was four years ago this month when President Trump warned Europe, and specifically Germany, that they would eventually run the risk of freezing their collective heinies off if they were foolish enough to trust Vladimir Putin for their energy needs.
As seen in the video below, the German contingent at the United Nations sure did get quite the belly-laugh at the expense of Pres. Trump.
As did the American liberal media, and the BBC, and Le Monde, and Der Spiegel, et cetera, et cetera.
But you know who never laughed? Vladimir Putin.
ICYMI, Deutsche Bank has gone as far as to tell the German people that if they want to stay warm this winter, they better start cutting down trees.
Speaking of chopping down trees, The Herald of Glasglow, Scotland reported back in 2020 that 14 MILLION trees had to be chopped down to make way for wind turbine farms. The hypocrisy is delicious.
Anyhow, take a gander at the map below.
According to the good folks over at the U.S. Energy Information Administration, roughly half planet was surveyed as to the amount of major shale gas basins these nations were sitting atop.
I don’t care how you slice it… that’s a lotta shale.
Now let’s look specifically at our European friends.
I will admit that the below map is already out of date. Although listed as “Allowed”, the following nations have recently outlawed or placed an indefinite moratorium on fracking;
- Belgium
- Denmark
- Germany
- Great Britain
- Slovenia
Not all that long ago, I noted that the last two remaining fracking drill sites in Great Britain were gleefully filled in with cement by then Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
In the same article, I noted in an article from London’s the Daily Mail;
The Bowland Field [shale plays (fields)] in Lancashire harbours 37.6 trillion cubic metres of the stuff. Even if we were to extract only 10 per cent of it — through a process called fracking — we’d have enough gas to be self-sufficient for 50 years.
Just me, but wouldn’t it be great if nations such as Poland, Spain, Hungary and the Baltic States became MAJOR power brokers to the likes of the Germans, French and British?
Just a thought.
As far as Germany is concerned, I found quite the interesting scholarly article penned by Alexandra Vetter for the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences back in August of 2016 (emphasis mine);
The latest estimate of the amount of technically recoverable shale gas is 11.3 – 71.7 Tcf [Trillion cubic feet].
In other words, 11.3 – 71.7 Tcf is roughly somewhere between 2 trillion – 13 trillion barrels of oil.
Please keep in mind that somewhere in the middle of that estimate is 7.5 trillion barrels of oil.
To get even more specific, let’s take a look at the ancestral homeland of millions upon millions of Americans.
There’s something in the northwest of Ireland called the Louch Allen Basin (see map below).
Never mind that said Basin is larger than every lake in Ireland combined, according to the everything-oil drilling news source RigZone.com (emphasis mine);
This evaluation… has estimated a potential in situ [Latin for “on site”] resource of 9.4 trillion cubic feet of gas, or 1.5 billion barrels of oil equivalent, with a predicted average recovery rate of 40 percent.
From my understanding, it’s normal for oil speculators to lowball the “predicted average recovery rate.” Imagine if Ireland could actually recover 60-80 percent of the oil and natural gas under the Emerald Isle?
Hmmm… RigZone also notes that Ireland currently IMPORTS 90 percent of their energy. Guess those Chinese-built solar panels and wind props aren’t all they’re cracked-up to be, huh?
Golly gee. I may not be all up to snuff on my global macro-economics, but does this mean that even pint-sized Ireland could not only become energy self-sufficient, but even an energy exporter?
Short answer to a complex question: No.
The Irish Dáil (Parliament) outlawed fracking in 2017.
I sure do hope that their woke policies keep them warm when that cold, wet wind sweeps down from the North Atlantic this winter.
