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Hydrocarbon price increases could have wrecked the world economy, but American oil men developed new technologies (fracking and horizontal drilling) to reopen depleted fields and find new productive fields. This reversed the decline in Ameican production and the United States is now not only a major producer of oil and natural gas, but has resumed exporting. This has been a major factor in keeping oil prices low in America and around the world. And America has much larger larger reserves of natural gas, largely untapped. Europeans who have to import most of their oil and natural gas have talked about using these technologies, but have failed to so. There have been some limited attempts. We have seen claims that geological structures are different in Europe. We are unable to assess those claims at this time. Green opposition to hydrocarbons seem more of a factor in preventing fracking and horizontal drilling in Europe. Not producing hydrocarbons has no benecials ebniromental imacts, because the Europeans continue to import the hydrcarbons they use in large quantity. They also use coal even though natural gas is much more clean burning. Some European countries are turning against nuclear which means they will have to use more coal and/or hydrocarbons. There is great interest in renewables, but the technology does not exist at this time to replace hydrocarbons with newnewals. Renewable energy production can be increased, but at this time it is generally more expensive and can only replace a small part of hydrcarbon demand. And there are a range of problems with renewables. Apparently the Europeans prefer to spend vast sums importing oil and gas from the Russians and Arabs.
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