America: The Energy Superpower HOUSTON-Ten years ago, the United States was producing 63 billion cubic feet of natural gas and 5 million barrels of oil a day, with only a slight percentage of total supplies flowing from "tight rocks." Jump forward to 2018 and America has been recast as a global energy superpower, on track to produce more than 80 Bcf of gas and 10 MMbbl/d of oil-both all-time highs, and both enabled almost entirely by soaring output from resource plays. What the U.S. energy industry-led by independent oil and gas companies with corporate logos few of the consumers benefitting from their efforts would recognize-has accomplished is nothing short of astonishing. The laws of nature and physics, not to mention petroleum engineering, dictate that a finite resource will deplete over time. Instead, after more than a century of producing oil and gas, U.S. reserve estimates and production volumes for both oil and gas abruptly and dramatically reversed course with the development of shale gas and tight oil. Given the magnitude of the swing from world's largest energy importer to potentially one of the world's largest exporters, it is hard to think of a single historic corollary. By Philip H. "Pete" Stark and Bob Fryklund APRIL 2018 77