The Wall Street Journal has a terrific review article tomorrow about natural gas, and how the industry (with some encouragement from regulators) has gotten caught short. There's a lot of good stuff in there, about utility hedging, exploration, and supply chain management. This, though, caught my eye:
Natural gas has swung to scarcity from abundance in recent years as energy companies run out of easy-to-tap wells. Unlike oil, it's hard to ship natural gas across the ocean, so more than 97% of U.S. supply comes from North America....
On the supply side, there likely will be more LNG terminals, perhaps outside the hurricane-prone Gulf region. (LNG is Liquified Natural Gas, the only cost-efficient way to ship gas in tankers - ed.)
So, we're basically completely energy-independent when it comes to natural gas. And yet, the price has risen in response to the supply-and-demand equation. (Gas is harder to extract now, partly from regulation, and partly from depletion of the low-hanging fruit. This makes the more expensive extraction techniques cost-effective. This will bring tremendous new fields into play; this country has plenty of natural gas.)
But part of the proposed solution is to tie the country more closely into the world market for gas.
In any event, the morons who prattle on about energy independence are living in a fantasy world. The last time we may have had actual energy independence was when we were clear-cutting our forests and Quaker State Oil was in the can, not just on the label.