Certain Jackasses AND Stupid Republicans are he!! bent on punishing Energy Companies for their outrageous windfall profits, which are ultimately due to their own stupidity in the past. But a closer look, shows that these companies pay out their profits in the form of dividends, which go to millions of stock owners, AND also lead to further exploration.
This article clearly shows that the later example is stimulating a new "rush" to bring in more energy, which will ultimately lead to more energy, and at a cheaper cost.
Here is the first part of the article.
Energy companies swarm the Rockies
Drilling in long-neglected fields, oil and gas producers are spending billions and transforming a state in the process
By DAVID IVANOVICH
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle
PINEDALE, WYO. - Oil and gas producers are stampeding to the Rockies.
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With natural gas prices hitting all-time highs and Gulf of Mexico production still recovering from a hurricane-plagued year, energy companies — many with ties to Houston — are drilling up long-neglected fields.
The Rockies are thought to hold enough gas to heat and cool 70 million homes for nearly half a century, the National Petroleum Council estimates. But those resources are usually found in hard-to-produce deposits.
In their headlong rush, the energy companies are helping transform the nation's least populous state, where pronghorn antelope are said to still outnumber people.
Up and down Wyoming, oil-field service workers are packing hotels, not to mention Applebee's restaurants.
They're driving up local real estate prices and bedding down in spartan — and that means booze-free — living quarters dubbed "man camps."
Houston-based Halliburton Co. even promised to lease every room for years in a hotel yet to be built to jump-start that project.
Although thousands of oil-patch workers have flooded the state, virtually every energy company in the region is still desperate for help.
"It's tough attracting and keeping employees," said Delmar Crochet, director of business development for STS Thru Tubing, a Lafayette, La.-based oil-field service company. "The state's got 500,000 people in it, and the industry's on fire."
Or as Paul Taylor, a drilling supervisor for Sierra Engineering, puts it: "If you can pass the U.A. (urine analysis), you've got a job."
The lure for energy companies is an estimated 284 trillion cubic feet of gas that could be produced in the Rockies using current technology, according to the National Petroleum Council, an industry advisory group for the federal government.
The Rocky Mountain region "is literally the Middle East to natural gas," declared Fred Barrett, president of Denver-based producer Bill Barrett Corp., one of the largest operators in the region.
And unlike, say, the Gulf Coast, this area is a relatively undeveloped oil- and gas-producing region, with 80 percent to 85 percent of the resources still in the ground, Barrett said.
With numerous forecasters predicting natural gas prices will remain aloft for the foreseeable future, energy companies are spending billions of dollars to drill in an area largely overlooked since the oil and gas bust of the mid-1980s.
BP, for instance, showed how much it believed in the area's potential when it announced plans in October to spend approximately $2.2 billion in the next 15 years to drill 2,000 wells in Wyoming's Wamsutter Field.
Because the federal government controls so much of the land in this part of the country, oil and gas producers have flooded the Bureau of Land Management with applications for permits to drill.
In fiscal 2004, the bureau approved 5,747 drilling applications to drill on public lands in Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Montana, up fourfold from the industry slump in 1999. And the Bush administration is trying to speed the approval process.
Scores of drilling rigs have migrated to the area. And as a result, gas production was 31 percent higher in this region last year — 64 percent higher in Wyoming — than in 1999, the Energy Information Administration reported.-------------------------------------------