The tide is turning for natural gas. According to National Public Radio, recent advances in recovering natural gas from shale formations have dramatically increased estimated natural gas reserves. The station’s Morning Edition program reported that reserve estimates “are actually 35 percent higher than believed just two years ago, and some geologists say even that estimate is too conservative.”
Veteran NPR correspondent Tom Gjelten’s story “Rediscovering Natural Gas By Hitting Rock Bottom” includes a broad range of sources, including industry expert Robert Hefner and former U.S. Senator Tim Wirth, who now heads the United Nations Foundation.
“Natural gas is the fuel that can change everything for our nation,” says Hefner, who has stated his case in a new book titled The Grand Energy Transition. According to Gjelten, “Hefner argues that a big boost in the use of natural gas would dramatically lower greenhouse gas emissions and reduce the U.S. dependence on foreign oil. Much of the nation’s electrical power now generated by burning coal could instead come from natural gas, and a switch to natural gas-powered automobiles would produce dramatic results.”
According to Wirth, “There’s a huge capacity of natural gas that is lying idle. That makes absolutely no sense at all when what we’re trying to do is clean up the atmosphere.”
One area singled out in the story is the Marcellus basin, a 400-million-year-old shale formation stretching from New York to West Virginia. Gjelten reports that by itself the Marcellus “alone is believed to hold as much as 500 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, the equivalent of about 80 billion barrels of oil.
Anyone interested in learning more about the widespread existence of shale gas formations can click on this interactive map available from NPR.