Rep. Mike Ross
Arkansas has a lot of home-grown energy.
We have what’s known as the Fayetteville Shale which is an area where we’re discovering a lot of natural gas. Natural gas, of course, is one of the cleanest forms of energy available to us. It’s available here at home in America, and we need to use as much natural gas as we can to replace imported oil as an energy source.
What’s the story on the Fayetteville Shale?
It’s a very large deposit of natural gas that kind of runs across the central part of Arkansas. Some say it will even rival the Barnett Shale in Texas. There was a time when no one knew the Fayetteville Shale existed. Then there was a time where they knew it existed, but they didn’t have the technology to extract the natural gas from it. And then the technology came along where we could recover natural gas from the Fayetteville Shale, but the economics of it didn’t work out.
Finally, in this new 21st century economy that we live in, we’ve been able to utilize new technologies to find ways to recover that natural gas here at home in an affordable manner. And in doing so, we’re reducing our dependence on foreign oil, and it’s good for the environment.
What about renewables?
Arkansas unfortunately is not a wind state, but we’ve become home to the manufacturing of a lot of wind turbines. So while these wind turbines are being located in other parts of the country where there’s more wind, many of the turbines are actually being built in Arkansas.
Gov. Mike Beebe has done a tremendous job with his economic development team in landing numerous companies that make wind turbines in Arkansas, creating hundreds of new green-collar jobs here at home.
Again, while we’re not a wind state, we’re able to help create this new American-made green energy by producing or manufacturing many of the wind turbines right here in Arkansas.
INTERVIEW CONDUCTED, CONDENSED, AND EDITED BY ERIC O’KEEFE