U.S. Takes Top Energy Spot

摘要

As with the space race and the nuclear arms race, the United States and Russia have long competed to be the world's largest producer of natural gas and petroleum -crude oil and other hydrocarbons trapped underground. Russia had been first for the past decade, but the U.S. took the title this year by a wide margin, thanks to a boom in hydraulic fracturing, commonly known as tracking. This extraction method, which cracks open shale rock to access hard-to-reach gas and oil reserves, has made U.S. production soar.