but after its death I worry about its legacy and I don't mean financial legacy. What about all those thousands of wells, will they still effect the water tables. How about all those injection sites, will the poisons still harm the environment?

BTW do you have any figures for British Columbia, Canada. We also have thousands of wells here, many in pristine wilderness. Some pristine Northern lakes have been seriously depleted to supply the enormous amount of water the frackers use.

to know how many jobs were created and lost or about to be lost by the fracking industry. Not that I'm for fracking to create jobs, I just think it is another part of the problem.

spending $3.8 billion for that pipeline across ND?

fuels in the ground, great! The sooner we get serious about renewables, the better.

By "offshore production" I don't mean to imply a source from other than the USA. I'm referring to the likes of the BP Deepwater Horizon and similar rigs. Most of these in the United States are in the Gulf of Mexico.

Disclosure: I am employed by a firm which provides services for the offshore oil industry, primarily in the Gulf, but also worldwide.

Our company pays very good money to have the best information available in regard to the petroleum industry. Further, the people running our show are quite experienced and have been through oil price crashes before, although no one has seen anything like this crash before. Now, they don't relay everything they know to the employees, but we do tend to get to hear the good news as they attempt to keep morale in the company up.

For almost a year now, we've been told to expect a return to higher oil prices by late 2016. Well, it's starting to be "late 2016" and we're seeing nothing of the kind. The information here in gjohnsit's essay tends to lead me to believe that any increase in prices is at least a year away.

Since I'm in the Houston area, I read the Houston Chronicle, a paper that covers the petroleum industry closely. For a few months now, their industry reporters have shied away from the "late 2016 recovery" meme. They have covered the fracking arm of the business extensively. Over a year ago, they predicted that one third of the fracking outfits would be bankrupt by mid 2016 or so, and that another third would go belly-up within a year of the first third. They've been spot on with that prediction.

There's been a somewhat unexpected development. The rig count in the West Texas fracking areas is on the rise. Turns out, the frackers have discovered that they can cut drilling costs by at least 40% and - even with prices as low as they now are - make money. I have read that some of the drillers have cut costs by nearly 60%. How they are doing this, I am not certain. Labor costs have undoubtedly plunged; those rig workers are desperate. Also, technology is being pushed as hard as possible, with new methods allowing reduced costs. I also suspect that environmental concerns are being given even less consideration than ever, but I have no proof of this. However, the drillers here in Texas can already do pretty much anything they want.

The angle I think has not been covered is the effect that low oil prices, combined with drastically lowered fracking costs, will have on offshore exploration and production.

The cost of new drilling in the Gulf of Mexico is astronomical. This is especially true since much of the new drilling is being done in water far deeper than we've seen historically. The BP Deepwater Horizon rig was an example of this type of extreme drilling. Formerly limited to no more than around 500 feet depth, new drilling may now see a mile from the vessel to the seabed. Rigs that formerly were physically "planted" on the seabed are now guyed in place by cables and kept in position by complex positioning systems. Many, if not all, of these deep water rigs are using North Sea technology, which is far advanced compared to that formerly utilized in the Gulf of Mexico. All of this technology, all of the logistics, all of the expertise needed to drill in such deep water costs money ... and a lot of it.

It's not that the major oil companies are going broke; they aren't. They are hurting compared to just a few short years ago, however. It's starting to look rather foolish to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on a highly risky deep water drilling project when one could spend a fraction of that for a payoff with fracking. Some companies have deserted the offshore business completely and are concentrating on land production. I think that's what we may be seeing with the sudden increase in the Texas rig count.

I'm not so sure the trade-off of fracking for offshore oil is a good one. We've seen what can happen with a failed deep water rig, and it isn't good. What I wonder about is the effect - largely still unknown - of pumping chemicals into our ground water to force the oil out. Perhaps it's a lose/lose situation. There is an economic aspect as well. Much of southern Louisiana is dependent on offshore oil production. There is much less dependence in Texas, although it exists. If you are not living along the oil producing regions of the US Gulf coast, you might not realize this, but certain areas are in dire straits due to the collapse of oil prices. Some of the last good-paying blue collar jobs are in the energy field. Whether this is good or bad is not my point; these jobs exist but we are now seeing tremendous pressure on them. These jobs are disappearing and fast.

While offshore oil production is not hazard-proof, huge advances have been made. Fracking? We don't even know. Our nation still depends on oil production and will for some time. I'm wondering what happens if we discover that fracking is simply a deadly mistake and is stopped, leaving us with a very depreciated offshore industry, lacking the means to recover in anything near the time necessary to avoid a shock to our economic system.

(Edited for a missing "e")