Have you ever wondered about the impressive numbers behind the U.S. oil and gas industry? The following infographic has all the answers. Even though oil production reached nearly 9,000,000 barrels per day in 2012, most people in the US are talking about “fracking”, slang for hydraulic fracturing, the controversial method for extracting shale gas.
There were about 45,000 fracking wells in the US in 2012 and the production of shale gas is skyrocketing as a result. Back in 2004, US shale gas production amounted to 0.6 trillion cubic feet and nearly 10 years on, that number has soared to 8.6 trillion.
This is predicted to hit the 17 trillion mark by 2040 and provide hundreds of thousands of jobs. The onset of fracking has drastically reshaped America’s natural gas landscape: in 2006 the US produced 524 billion cubic meters of natural gas and and this rose substantially to 681 billion by 2012.
