Shale Oil and Gas Industry: Opportunity or Threat

The development of shale oil and gas industry and its role in ensuring the world energy security has attracted the interest of many people in this area, in toto. Studies prima facie indicate that the shale oil and gas reserves could enhance about 92 percent of the world natural oil and gas reserves per se. Besides, utilization of new technologies to exploit the new resources, could improve the extraction of existing resources, which in turn will boost the supply of unconventional oil and gas reserves in the global level, sine qua non. However, the expansion of shale oil and gas industry, irrespective of paving grounds for escalation of world oil and gas supply, accretion of energy security, generating new job opportunities in the field, and adaptation of sophisticated apparatus in energy area, it may encounter serious challenges, quid pro qua. In this context, the mitigation of world oil prices and its volatility, which is widely felt globally, has imposed de jure certain backlash in the economy i.e. changing the hold arrangements of main agents in energy market, growing pollution of environment, deterioration of access to fresh water resources and rising the likelihood of an earthquake, etc pro rata. In this paper an attempt is made to investigate the efficacy of threats and opportunities emanating from a leading shale oil and gas industry Sui generis.