Autonomous Vehicle Consultant

Recently I received an email from Energy Citizens with an invitation to, “Join us for a telephone town hall to discuss natural gas exports on Friday, February 1st at 1:00pm. Learn more about why the world needs American natural gas and how that creates more jobs and energy security here at home.” Energy Citizens is a “front organization” for the American Petroleum Institute (API), a lobbying group for the fossil fuel industry. There is considerable discussion on the export of natural gas in the form of liquefied natural gas (LNG) due to its abundance created from horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (i.e., “fracking”)

Exporting natural gas (i.e., via LNG) would lead to domestic price increases, rippling throughout the U.S. economy and affecting the following:

• Electric power generation
• Residential heating,
• Space and water heating,
• Cooking
• Drying
• Commercial cooling
• Food service industry
• Combined heat and power
• Building block for methanol and its derivatives
• Natural gas vehicles

Price increases would enrich a relative few. However, the rest of us would “pay the price.”

It is not in the best interest of the United States to export natural gas because it is a non renewable energy resource. I am not aware of any other replacement energy resource that would be affordable, available and on a commercial scale to sustain the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the United States regarding the bulleted areas listed above.

The graph below illustrates the history of oil production in the lower 48 states with increasing production, reaching peak production and subsequent declining. This graph also shows increasing oil imports to off set declining domestic production. Why should the fate of natural gas be any different? Exporting natural gas would cause the production curve to reach a plateau sooner. What will the collective “we” do after the supply of natural gas has dwindled to insufficient levels?