Unfortunately I have had to miss the ASPO Meeting in Denver this week, and so cannot provide the daily reports that I have written in the past. But I notice that at least one of the talks has already caught a significant amount of press, and that is the one by Arthur Berman on the gas production from shale deposits such as the Barnett, Haynesville and Marcellus.

There has been a considerable hype in the press about the value of the gas from these shales, and the ability that they provide to bring in an “Age of Natural Gas”. Commenting on the situation last year, the CEO of Chesapeake noted:

. . .the U.S. today consumes about 63 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day - in energy BTU equivalency terms, that’s 10.5 million barrels of oil per day, or about half of the amount of oil that the U.S. consumes each day. Of that 63 bcf per day of natural gas consumption, we import about 1 bcf in the form of liquefied natural gas, or LNG, and we import about 8 bcf per day from Canada. This means that we are about 98.5% self-reliant on natural gas supply from North America and about 86% self-reliant on natural gas supply from the U.S. Contrast that with oil, where we are only about 41% North American self-reliant and only about 27% self-reliant from U.S. sources.