The shale gas boom just keeps getting bigger and bigger, having now reached what Nick Grealy calls a Wow! moment (H/T GWPF).
And surprise, surprise: China! Largest shale reserves in the world, surpassing even the US by far. I've said it before, and I'll say it again. The only way I have been wrong about shale is by underestimating it's impact. But the Chinese figures change everything. World LNG? Toast! Which can't help Australia too much even with 395. Which leads to the other southern hemisphere wonders, although since this site mentioned them both in Q3 2009, it's only the massive scale of the resource that surprises, not the locations:
South Africa 485!
Argentina 774! Repeat that. That is not a mistake. That is technicially recoverable. That is astounding.
For some, however, this kind of good news just can't go unchallenged and I sense that there is a concerted effort to hype up the idea that there might be some important environmental concerns. Take this article in Time magazine for example, or this forthcoming conference.
Meanwhile, Zeke, writing at Lucia's blog, looks at an old chart of hydrocarbon deposits and the proportion used to date - it's hard to get the two figures on the same chart because mankind has used so little. Zeke wonders what it would look like now we have discovered all this shale gas.