From today’s USA Today editorial on “fracking”:

Our view: ‘Fracking’ with care holds key to energy future
Little more than a decade ago, the United States was running so low on natural gas that companies were making plans to cover the shortfall with imports of liquefied natural gas. Today, though, the marine terminals built to dock huge LNG ships in Texas, Louisiana and Maryland are being converted to ship gas out, not just bring it in.
This remarkable reversal of fortune is the result of a dramatic boom in a drilling technique called hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” which uses high-pressure water mixed with chemicals and sand to crack open shale formations. This technique has brought a surprising amount of new gas production from states as disparate as Texas, North Dakota and Pennsylvania — enough combined with conventional supplies to last perhaps 100 years at current consumption rates.
That’s game-changing, wildly underdiscussed news. Gas now meets only about a quarter of the nation’s energy needs, much of it for home heating and industrial use. But if estimates of shale gas reserves are correct — and they seem to just get bigger — gas could begin to displace oil as a fuel for vehicles and might even help unseat coal as the nation’s dominant fuel for generating electricity. Price pressures would ease; dependence on unstable supplies of foreign oil could decline.
But, as with other energy sources, there’s a catch, and it’s a big one. Fracking has caused some serious problems in many of the places where it has been used over the past several years, enough to threaten its promising future.

The rest here.

For more on domestic natural gas supplies, see T. Boone Pickens over on the homepage.