New Powerlines for South and Southwest, Daniel Yergin states Hydraulic Fracturing tied to 1.7 Million New U.S. Jobs

ITC Holdings corporation has filled with the Southwest Power Pool for an initiative to build 2,700 miles of new transmission lines focused on exporting energy from the west to the east across the SPP region.  This expansion plan is done in coordination with Black Veatch over a year ago and calls for constructing five main 345 kV transmission lines along these routes:• western Kansas to southern Iowa,•east central Nebraska to north central Iowa, • Western Oklahoma to south central Missouri, • southwest Kansas to south central Missouri, • eastern Texas through Southern Oklahoma to southest Arkansas.  These projects are aimed to make the transmission grid operate more efficienty and effectively. 

Daniel Yergin, noted energy industry analyst has an excellent piece on the mostly positive implications of the shale gas and oil revolution in the U.S..  He says these implications are are only now just beginning to be understood.  Yergin’s piece in The Wall Street Journal plays off a research study released Tuesday by his firm, IHS.  Among the conclusions, fracking of gas and oil shale is tied to an astounding  1.7 million new jobs since the technology became widely adopted  half a decade ago.  According to Yergin, that number could rise to 3 million jobs by 2020.  The increased energy production in the U.S. will boost federal and state revenues by $62 billion this year alone, according to Yergin.  A very interesting fact he pointed out is that increased domestic oil production since 2008 adds up to nearly 80% of Iran’s export level before sanctions were imposed on the rogue nation.  In spite of local and state concerns about environmental hazards, Yergin argues that the resurgent domestic energy industry “represents a major opportunity for the U.S.