Will Unconventional Natural Gas Save Us?

[4dsc]

http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2006/3/8/222920/5485

FOr anyone really interested in following our country's energy concerns, may I suggest you visit theoildrum.com. Very informative and livey discussions.. So forget about oil peaking, natural gas seem to be the next problem we are facing and rather quickly too.. This is a long article but explains alot!!

Here we go again, this story is about natural gas supplies in North America and the US in particular. Lately, TOD has had some posts on Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) imports as the way to solve the North American natural gas crisis (here, here and here). The point of these posts concerning LNG is that there are real unavoidable concerns that LNG imports will not provide us with sufficient supply to meet inelastic demand soon enough by 2010 or even come anywhere close to meeting these supply problems in the period beyond the end of this decade. Beyond oil and the apparent world-wide peak in light sweet crude, the more I think about our energy problems, the more I come to the conclusion that natural gas shortages in North America are imminent in the timeframe beginning now and for the forseeable future (perhaps 5 to 10 years out or beyond). The damage this could do to the US economy is enormous. In my view, there is a real crisis pending so this post examines another whole part of the equation in future projections for providing natural gas to meet projected demand involving drilling for Unconventional Natural Gas Resources (pdf)-- an overview of what these resources are. The importance of unconventional gas (pdf) is expected to grow out to 2025.