During the past few years, the United States has received an unexpected energy windfall: put simply, we have a lot more natural gas than we previously thought. This realization is altering America’s energy future in a fundamental way. For many years, the conventional wisdom was that natural gas would play an important role as a bridge fuel but then fade away as the U.S. and the world turned to renewable sources of energy later in the 21st century.
Recent discoveries of enormous gas reserves in the United States offer a very different vision for the future of natural gas. Expanding domestic production will resolve the primary issue that is presently keeping natural gas from becoming the dominant energy resource in the U.S.: the inadequacy of supplies to guarantee long-term availability at reasonable and predictable prices. Yet a recent report by the MIT Energy Initiative estimates that U.S. reservoirs may contain enough natural gas to meet demand for 90 to 100 years at current consumption levels with much less price volatility.
New technology enabling the extraction of natural gas from shale has been called the most significant energy innovation this century; this discovery has spurred the expansion of U.S. natural gas production. Technology developed primarily in the United States has made the dramatic expansion of U.S. natural gas resources possible. Further technical improvements may enable an even larger expansion of our natural gas resources. ExxonMobil, a company nearly synonymous with oil, now predicts that natural gas will be the fastest growing major fuel source worldwide through 2030. Clearly, something very significant has happened in the world of energy.
Read the entire policy brief here.
Tags: Fracking, natural gas, Policy Memo
[...] a lot more there. Take a trip over to PPI to read the full paper. It’s a quick [...]
This new technology will surely address our growing need for fuel but I do hope that this wouldn’t cause any huge detrimental effect on our environmental resources.
[...] Natural Gas Reconsidered, by Roger Cooper [...]
I believe that the expansion of natural gas exploration and especially the process of fracking is going to encourage vehicle manufacturers to move more and more in the direction of NG. Already, a large number of transit buses are CNGV and many trucking fleets are switching to Natural Gas. I believe the number of CNG vehicles for sale will increase drastically over the coming years. See http://www.naturalgas-vehicles.com/natural-gas-vehicles-for-sale.html which is a good related site. To me, this is great news since natural gas is a very clean burning fuel and we have an abundance of it. This removes our dependency on foreign fuel and bolsters our national security.