Big Fracking Deal!

Years ago, when I was very young in my career, I car pooled with my boss. He was a great guy, a WW II vet and a real patriot. In the late seventies, after the Department of Energy was fully operational, it was leaked out that the world was going to run out of natural gas within a decade. My boss went absolutely crazy. "Oh, they have us all tied into natural gas now, and pretty soon there will be nothing coming through the pipeline! I have six kids and I can't afford to not have heat in the winter time!" In fact, he was so convinced that the prediction was going to come true, he went out and had a wood burning fireplace installed in his house so he would have a fall back solution if the gas did in fact get shut off.

Fast forward to today. Guess what? We have not yet run out of natural gas! In fact, the strangest thing has happened - we keep discovering more natural gas just in our country.
In fact, a few years ago every geologist involved in Appalachian Basin knew about the  Devonian black shale called the Marcellus. Its black color made it easy to spot in the field and its slightly radioactive signature made it a very easy pick on a geophysical well log. Marcellus might soon be a major contributor to the natural gas supply of the United States - large enough to be spoken of as a "super giant" gas field.

According to the United States Energy Information Association, there are 2,203 trillion cubic feet of natural gas that is technically recoverable in the United States. At the rate of U.S. natural gas consumption in 2011,that is enough natural gas is enough to last about 92 years. This amount is just what is known of now, with our present technology. The Marcellus find has been estimated upwards many times. Some experts believe we have so much gas, either in proven finds or suspected locations, we could be a net exporter to countries like China by the end of the decade.

Much of this newly discovered natural gas would have been off limits to us not that many years ago. We just did not have the technology to get it. However with new fracking methods, the amount of gas we are able to harvest keeps going up. The combination of this improving technology as well as new pockets being discovered have led the amount of provable reserves of natural gas in Ohio alone to go up 4400% in one year!

One of the huge benefits of energy independence with natural gas is it will solve the problems of importing it from overseas. The only feasible way to transport natural gas is to liquefy it. By liquefying it, the volume of the gas can be temporarily reduced down by 600%. However, to do so, there are additional costs and risks involved. In addition, having tankers filled with Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) arrive in America will do no good if we do not have adequate facilities to regasify and then distribute the gas. New regasification plants are very hard to construct due to NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard). In fact the utility company by New York City has been trying for years now to get a plant constructed and the two Senators from New York have been holding it up. Again, all the LNG in the world will do us not good if we do not have adequate facilities to regasify.

Here are the facts on LNG. In the United States, we have only one LNG liquefaction plant and one other in the planning stages. In addition we have eleven active regasification plants, with zero under construction, three in the planning stage and an additional eleven more that have been cancelled or suspended. Without going into an enormous amount of facts and figures on liquefaction, regasification, pipelines and storage facilities, I will just say this - we don't have enough. If we truly want natural gas to be an important part of our energy future, we need the infrastructure to do so.

Sometimes I think other countries look at us and scratch their heads. As with the Keystone Pipeline, which could have added so much additional oil (and jobs) to our growing energy needs, our national enthusiasm for exploiting this resource is just as low. We can use this treasure to be a real and immediate game changer. The prospects are real, the need is now. Lets do it - trust me, it will be a gas.