Worrying Too Much, Or Not Enough, About Natural Gas?
Posted by Sonja Ebron
Unlike oil, whose production follows a bell curve, natural gas production tends to peak and drop off a cliff. Oil is liquid and therefore easy to import, while natural gas is mostly restricted to pipelines because it’s a gas. You don’t want to carry large volumes of gas over the shipping lanes unless you like fireworks a lot.
Five or ten years ago, something like 90% of all new power plants were being built to use natural gas as a fuel. Lots of industrial processes also switched to use natural gas directly. Over time, those changes lifted demand for natural gas while supply stayed flat, and now it’s expensive. Natural gas production in the lower 48 U.S. states has nearly peaked, so we get a lot from Canada and Mexico. But exporting countries increasingly need more of their own stuff, so we’ve either got to find a way to import from others or to dramatically decrease consumption soon.
