Boundless natural gas, boundless opportunities

AS: Well, that's going to be part of the debate. I don't have the answer to that, and I doubt that anybody at this point has the complete answer to that question. What is the economic impact? Does it increase jobs or not? What is the environmental impact of producing, moving and refining the crude oil? What are the national security implications? Is it better to keep the oil here, or to move it into global markets where it might have an ameliorating effect on volatility? There are a lot of questions, so I'm not going to try to pre-judge that debate.

JS: The EIA has noted that after two years of declining production, US coal output is expected to increase in 2014, forecast to rise almost 4%, as higher natural gas prices make coal more competitive for power generation. At the same time, there is concern about the EPA's proposed new carbon emissions standards for power plants, which would make it impossible for new coal-fired plants to be built without the implementation of carbon capture and sequestration technology, or "clean-coal" tech. Is this a feasible strategy in your opinion?

AS: Well, the facts as you laid them out are certainly what the EIA is looking at. Natural gas prices have gone up, so in 2013, we already saw some recovery in coal at electric utilities. As a consequence, energy-related carbon dioxide emissions actually climbed in 2013 and probably are going to do so again in 2014 for the reasons that you stated.

Longer term, even without changes by the Environmental Protection Agency, there'll be coal retirements, and the amount of coal being burned in the US will eventually come below the amount of electricity being generated by natural gas. So sometime after the year 2030, we will have more electricity in the US being produced from natural gas than from coal.

JS: What can we expect from US onshore natural gas production over the next two years;
over the next five years? And where will production increases offset declines?

AS: Well, the EIA has been pretty clear on this in our Annual Energy Outlook Reference case for 2014, which we published in mid-December. We reiterated what we said the previous year: natural gas production in the US is going to continue to grow very strongly. We are close to 70 billion cubic feet a day of output now. That number will be over 100 billion cubic feet a day by 2040. Shale gas will be easily 50% or more of production by 2040.

We also see increases in natural gas production from geologic formations that we don't consider to be shale gas. We think that there might also be some production, believe it or not, from Alaska, because the economics ultimately will favor construction of an LNG facility in Alaska that would allow production from the associated gas in the North Slope of Alaska.

Just in the last five years, we've seen natural gas production in the US from shale go from about five billion cubic feet a day to nearly 30 billion cubic feet a day--a huge increase. A lot of that is coming from places like the Haynesville-and more recently the Marcellus in Pennsylvania and West Virginia. In our view, those production trends are going to continue without the likelihood of running into a plateau from a geologic standpoint.

JS: How do you see future extraction, development and commercialization of oil and gas resources in the Americas playing out over the next 5-10 years?

AS: Well, the big new opportunities, I think--certainly in the US and Canada--lie in the development of shale resources. There are oil and gas shale resources in places like Argentina, Mexico, Columbia, and elsewhere across the Americas. Whether or not the very rapid development of shale resources in the US can be duplicated in a lot of other countries-even in the Americas-remains to be seen. Certainly there has been some interesting progress in developing shale resources in Canada and Argentina.

I've been hearing from many people that they're quite hopeful there will be developments in shale in Colombia, and given the constitutional changes that have now been agreed in Mexico, that opens up an opportunity for Mexico to step into this area.

One of the things that is happening is the increase in oil production in the US and the fact that we have very sophisticated refineries with very strong technology, while relatively low natural gas prices are allowing us to run our refineries at higher utilization rates and dispose of surplus products-by exporting petroleum products like gasoline and diesel fuel-into Latin America and Canada.