You know the old Atlas adage, "as goes King, so goes the country."
One of the interesting findings of the report is that we are going
to have to lift the export ban by 2015, because otherwise the excess supply would drive down prices to where it will become unprofitable and kill the boom. Of course that will be mitigated by the fact shale's breakeven price, as we get more infrastructure in place, may drop to $35 by 2020, which changes its economics completely.
I don't know how much of an effect on other sectors their forecast includes (the lower energy costs are, the more competitive our manufacturing sector becomes), but the idea of our trade deficit narrowing to 0.3% is tantalisingly close to zero. We'd become something of a petrostate. I'd support starting a SWF, actually, but we'd need to somehow get the politicians' hands out of the pot. Either way, we have a bright energy future ahead of us.
East Africa (no, not Ethiopia), is another area where they seems to be a lot of untapped potential, some of it might be coming online by then. Prices are going to be going down unless China or India sees an unforecasted spike in growth.
I agree with traininthedistance obviously, that we shouldn't use this an excuse to revert to the suburban idyll... ick. I really hope that doesn't happen. I'm also skeptical of the "green tech is growing because of coolness". There's a lot of hype, sure, but they'll be expected to really get near the costs of conventional power generation soon or there will be a bust. Tesla, anyway, is powered by electricity... powered by natural gas plants.
