Just as the 49th parallel is invisible to the human eye, it is also invisible to the progress of the energy renaissance. For most of the 20th century, Russia and the Middle East were the world's energy superpowers, but North America is well on its way to altering mat status quo. Hydrocarbon reserves in the U.S., previously deemed unrecoverable, are now economic to drill thanks to new technologies such as horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing. This is turning the Big Five shale plays—the Eagle Ford, the Bakken, the Marcellus/Utica, the Montney and Du-vernay—into household names.
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