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We need to rebuild a strong America with a sound energy policy ensuring strong energy security. Our energy and national security are too important to lose this opportunity.

The vital nexus of energy, water, and national security



The U.S. currently maintains some 160,000 military personnel in approximately 150 countries worldwide with the majority serving in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. This number does not include the thousands of troops involved in singular contingency operations at any time around the globe. All total, more than 2.6 million Americans have served in the Global War on Terrorism since 9/11, with many of these men and women serving multiple deployments.
The Global War on Terrorism has been a war largely fought in the broadly connected region of Central Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa. This region is also home to many of the nations that comprise OPEC (the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries), the oil cartel that supplies the U.S. with much of our imported oil. Dependency on foreign energy endures as a strategic weakness, as the U.S. continues to import almost six-million barrels of oil a day from many countries, including nation states which have actively opposed the United States or harbor terrorists such as Iran, Libya and Nigeria among others. Each year, the U.S. sends more than $237-billion abroad to meet our energy needs and doing business with OPEC nations will undoubtedly continue in the short-term. However, as a matter of national interest in the long-term, counting on hostile nations for our energy needs should be viewed as an expensive, dangerous, and increasingly unnecessary option. More than any time in American history, domestic energy production is a safe and efficient means by which the U.S. may shift away from dangerous foreign-oil dependency. President Obama acknowledged, “We are now in a position to produce more of our own oil than we buy from other nations, and we produce more natural gas than anybody else.”

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Indeed, and domestic production has created a renaissance of American manufacturing and has spurred tremendous job creation. According to the American Petroleum Institute, “In 2011 the [oil and natural gas] industry supported more than 9.8 million jobs, 600,000 more jobs than it supported just two years earlier,” and “industry operations supported 8.4 million full and part-time jobs nationally, while its capital investment supported another 1.4 million jobs.” At the heart of this domestic energy boom is the pairing of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (aka “hydrofracking”) to access oil and natural gas that is trapped in shale rock layers far beneath the surface of the earth. The innovative usage of these techniques enables American energy producers to extract the vast and plentiful reserves of oil and natural gas in our shale reserves that were previously thought beyond the reach of economic production. This is shifting the balance of worldwide gas and oil production, dramatically reducing our dependency on foreign oil, and strengthening our national security. How does it all work? It begins with horizontal drilling, essentially drilling vertically several thousand feet deep before making a 90-degree turn and drilling horizontally, enabling a single drilling pad site to reach far into shale reserves – even in multiple directions from the same pad site. At that point, hydraulic fracturing of the hard shale rock occurs by pumping fracturing fluid at (primarily a mix of sand and water) at high-pressure which releases the oil and natural gas within the shale formation. The innovations leading to expanded production have been nothing short of revolutionary. Naturally there have been some challenges associated with certain aspects of the shale energy production, such as the volume of water consumed. These concerns have been taken seriously and are allayed upon a close examination of the processes involved. Water usage estimates vary depending on the location and geology of the shale formations, but Dr. Kyle Murray, a hydrogeologist with the Oklahoma Geological Survey (University of Oklahoma), reports that, for example, in 2011, hydraulic fracturing in Oklahoma – home to thousands of horizontal wells – used less than one percent of water compared with all other uses of freshwater. By comparison, a single golf course (out of the 15,000-plus courses across the U.S.) uses as much fresh water in one summer month as is needed to fracture one well.  Water is a precious resource and American know-how, ingenuity and industriousness are hard at work creating even greater efficiencies in the usage and recycling of water used in domestic energy operations. In fact, the water used to stimulate production is a fraction of the amount of naturally occurring “produced water” from deep inside the earth that flows from the well during production. Energy companies are developing increasingly efficient methods for repurposing this water, such as farm irrigation, livestock watering, ecosystem and habitat maintenance, road spreading for dust control, deicing, fire control, water for drilling mud, and water for various industrial cooling units. A prime example of creative use for produced water can be found in northwestern Oklahoma where iodine from natural sources is extracted from produced water and purified for use in the pharmaceutical industry, cattle feed supplements, and in the production of rubber and nylon.  For the last 14 years, we have been fighting a war against terrorists and radical insurgents who hail from, enjoy freedom of movement in, and are often secretly supported by the very nations we are sending billions of dollars to annually for our energy. Meanwhile, we have lost jobs here at home, and we have lost lives of our young Americans deployed overseas. We need to rebuild a strong America with a sound energy policy ensuring strong energy security. Our energy and national security are too important to lose this opportunity. We simply must do it right for our generation and future generations of Americans.


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Thomas S. Mullikin -- Bio and Archives

Thomas S. Mullikin is an environmental attorney, author, and professor of Marine Science at Coastal Carolina University. He has traveled to many of Earth’s most remote regions in his lifelong quest to better understand and help develop new energy solutions.


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