I wrote this blog a week ago, before the trip I'm currently on to Seattle. Yesterday's Wall Street Journal changed the whole circumstance. The public now knows about our gas reserves. Here is the small article:
The amount of natural gas available for production in the U.S. has soared 58% in the past four years, driven by a drilling boom and the discovery of huge new gas fields in Texas, Louisiana and Pennsylvania, a new study says.
The report, due to be released Thursday by the nonprofit Potential Gas Committee, concludes that the U.S. has 2,074 trillion cubic feet of natural gas still in the ground, or nearly a century's worth of production at current rates. That's a 35.4% jump over the committee's previous estimate, in 2007, of 1,532 trillion cubic feet, the biggest increase in the committee's 44-year history.
999 people out of 1,000 didn't know about the natural gas finds that open a new era, (aside from the few more who read yesterday's news).
There have been massive new discoveries of natural gas in the United States and Canada in the past year, particularly due to new extraction from shale technologies. The discoveries have been so massive that the price of natural gas has fallen in one year from $13.7 Mcf to $3.51. Part of that price decline is also a decline in global demand.
I
could not find the single Web source to show the magnitude of the
expansion in the natural gas reserves in the U.S. before yesterday. I am still unable to read the core data on estimates of reserves, since the field
is arbitrarily arcane. But I am getting many reports from friends in
the fuel industry and in the related utility industry who expect the U.S. experience to be projected to Canada and the world.
What does this mean? Since a new car can be put on the market using natural gas for the same price as a new petroleum burning car, the U.S. can make a rapid shift to 50% natural gas in autos and electric energy, with just domestic natural gas, in as little as four years. It means:
(1) With just existing market forces (forget the government and subsidies) and expanding natural gas reserves, we are in for an era when the oil producers in the Middle East will be significantly diminished in power. We Americans can go back to driving big SUVs and loving it.
(2) When foreign car companies offer the natural gas option, for big cars, the new tiny gasoline cars made by Government Motors will be scrap.
(3) We are entering a new era of long term low energy prices. The Lefties and PC Enviros will have to find something else to be unhappy about. Some other contagious paranoia.
