Our View: www.Louisiana, always a power in the energy industry, continues to find new developments in the sector, most recently with word that another oil and natural gas shale play is being explored.

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The area of interest, in northern Louisiana and southern Arkansas, is known as the Brown Dense or the Lower Smackover.
That area and the Tuscaloosa Marine Shale, which runs across Central Louisiana, have been identified as regions that could have the level of natural gas production found at the Haynesville Shale play. That high-production play, in northwest Louisiana, is one of the main reasons the state has not been hit as hard as some by the national recession.
Both the Brown Dense and the Tuscaloosa Marine also may have significant oil reserves. The Tuscaloosa Marine, for example, is believed to hold 7 billion barrels of oil, according to Loren Scott, professor emeritus at Louisiana State University and founder of Loren C. Scott & Associates, an economics consulting and forecasting firm based in Baton Rouge.
Likewise, both areas, if developed, will experience horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing. The latter is the high-pressure drilling process known as fracking that shatters shale rock and allows previously inaccessible natural gas to escape.
The combination of chemicals and technology used in fracking is the most controversial part of the process required to extract natural gas from ultra-dense rock. While going after the gas -- the cleanest-burning of all carbon fuels -- the possibility contaminating groundwater and underground aquifers is real and to be taken seriously.
Also real is the serious investment being made to explore these area.
Southwestern Energy Co. of Houston, for example, already has invested $150 million in undeveloped acreage in the Brown Dense area. It is drilling its first west well in Arkansas and plans to seek a permit to drill a second, in Claiborne Parish, by the end of the year.
"We in Louisiana have a long and distinguished history of providing the energy that fuels this nation," Natural Resources Secretary Scott A. Angelle said in a statement about the Brown Dense, "and I am bullish on the future of energy production in this state."
The good news he sees comes amid dramatic related discoveries around the country. A revised assessment of the natural gas in the Marcellus shale formation in the nation's Northeast, for example, just soared -- from 2 trillion cubic feet to 84 trillion cubic feet.
That is one small piece of a national supply that is large enough to unhinge the nation from its reliance on foreign oil -- something that must be done and, with help from Louisiana, can be done


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