For the past three decades the quantity of petroleum (both oil and oil plus gas) found per foot of drilling effort in the United States for any given year can be expressed as a secular decrease of about 2 percent per year combined with an inverse function of drilling effort for that year. Extrapolation of energy costs and gains from petroleum drilling and extraction indicates that drilling for ...

a r t i c l e i n f o The use of high-volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing (fracking) has increased substantially over the past five years in the United States. Use of this drilling technology to extract natural gas from hitherto impermeable shale is expected to increase even more in coming decades. Two institutions, integration contracts and well spacing requirements, evolved to mitigate the...

This paper attempts to provide a unified framework that takes into account various aspects of the oil and natural gas exploratory process such as the depletion of the resource base with time, uncertainty in drilling, changing economic incentives and the joint product aspects of the oil and gas exploration. The equilibrium in the market for oil and natural gas prospects is first described and th...

In April 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil well exploded, releasing over four million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. This paper presents data from two national mail surveys undertaken in 2008 and 2010 that compare public attitudes to both offshore oil drilling and offshore wind development preand postspill. The results show that while there was a drop in support for expanded drilling (fr...