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Boundless natural gas, boundless opportunities

By James Stafford - posted Wednesday, 26 February 2014


The Energy Information Agency (EIA) has predicted that natural gas production in the US will continue to grow at an impressive pace. Right now output is close to 70 billion cubic feet a day and is expected to reach over 100 billion cubic feet per day by 2040. The trend is likely to continue without hitting a geologic "peak", and along with this trend will come new marketing opportunities for America.

EIA Administrator AS discusses:

  • What's at stake in lifting the US crude export ban
  • Whether lifting the ban is inevitable
  • Why energy-related CO2 emissions will likely climb this year
  • What we can expect from US coal output through 2014
  • Why US natural gas production will continue to grow strongly
  • Where we can expect (unexpectedly) new production to come from
  • Why Alaska just might surprise us
  • Where the biggest new shale opportunities lie
  • How production increases might come from 'non-shale' formations
  • The potential for Colombian shale
  • What to expect from Mexico's reforms
  • What the Panama Canal expansion really means
  • Why we will see new marketing opportunities for the US
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Interview by James Stafford of Oilprice.com

James Stafford: US mainstream media are heralding the debate over lifting the US crude oil export ban as potentially one of the most critical for this year. While most agree this is not likely to happen anytime soon, is it an eventuality?

AS: When I first took office at the EIA, I said that light sweet crude oil production was growing very rapidly, and that it would ultimately have a number of impacts on the energy infrastructure in the US; for instance, that we would see changes in things like movement of oil by rail. We would see changes in refinery configurations designed to deal with light sweet crude. The Gulf Coast refineries in the US over the past decade were upgraded to run heavy sour imports, and so there are issues with the ability of refineries in the US to handle rapid increases in light sweet crude oil production.

I noted at the time that at some point, policymakers were going to be confronted with all of these changes resulting from the enormous shift in thinking about US production growth. Five or 10 years ago, everybody thought that US oil production would just go down, and demand would always go up. Now we have in the EIA's forecast over the next five years very strong growth in crude oil production and weak growth-if not negative trends-going on in gasoline and liquid fuels demand. This creates an interesting atmosphere.

Is lifting the crude export ban inevitable? I'm not sure that anything is inevitable. Certainly what I've learned in the last five years is that the inevitable declines in production and growth in demand didn't come true.

JS: What are the congressional hurdles faced here?

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AS: I don't know that there's a hurdle. That's a question that's going to be dealt with by policymakers. Energy policy issues generally tend to involve environmental concerns, national security concerns, and economic concerns.

The biggest hurdle that congress faces is just having good information on future trends in supply and demand, refinery configurations and pipeline and railroad transportation infrastructure.

JS: What would be the consequences of lifting this ban, for the industry, for refiners, for consumers?

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This article was first published at OilPrice.com.



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About the Author

James Stafford is the publisher of OilPrice.com.

Other articles by this Author

All articles by James Stafford

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