The Dutch love affair with natural gas: A cautionary tale for the United States?

The story sounds familiar. For decades oil and natural gas drilling have been proceeding and creating prosperity for those involved. At some point significant earthquakes occur in areas where they were formerly very rare or nonexistent. Those quakes are linked to oil and gas drilling and production. The industry denies the link.

The quakes continue, get worse and finally get strong enough to do damage.

To those living in the United States, this reads like stories coming out of the fracking boom in states that include Oklahoma, Texas, Ohio, Kansas and Arkansas. To those living in Europe, it's the story coming out of The Netherlands, home to the Groningen Gas Field, one of the largest natural gas finds ever.

The Groningen field has been both a blessing and a curse for the Dutch. Since its discovery in 1959 the Dutch have reaped huge financial benefits from having their own secure and abundant source of natural gas. Beyond that, the country has until recently been a major exporter of natural gas to its European neighbors.

Taking a short break - no post this week

I'm taking a short break and expect to post again on Sunday, February 26.

Does the Australian LNG export experience foreshadow soaring U.S. natural gas prices?

Two times last winter Australians living in the country's eastern region paid more than twice as much for natural gas as did Japanese customers taking delivery of liquefied natural gas (LNG) from the same region. (Australia has three separate natural gas pipeline networks which create three domestic natural gas markets, Eastern, Northern and Western.)

The price spikes had eastern natural gas users, particularly business users, hopping mad about what they perceive as foolish energy policy. That policy, they say, gives away Australian energy resources at bargain prices to foreign countries while making domestic industries that are reliant on those resources less competitive because of high energy costs. In addition, the new volatility in gas prices makes planning difficult and expansion financially risky.

The dust-up in Australia has some people thinking that the same thing could happen in the United States, something I pointed out in 2013. In the United States the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has approved natural gas export terminals with a capacity of 17 billion cubic feet (bcf) per day. That represents 19 percent of current U.S. natural gas production. If all terminals for which applications are pending or expected are included, the number goes up to 42 bcf per day or about 47 percent of current production. Only one U.S. export facility is currently in operation in the lower 48 states. Another facility in Alaska has been exporting LNG to Asia since 1969.

Risk, double-edged swords and imagining the worst

A friend of mine recently said that intellectual honesty often requires imagining the worst. Of course, in the study of climate change and natural resources one needs only to read the analyses of scientists to imagine the worst.

Imagining the worst is not necessarily the same as believing the worst is inevitable or even likely. It can be merely a standard part of both scenario and emergency planning. Of course, imagining the worst can also be a double-edged sword with a sinister edge, sometimes eliciting Richard Hofstadter's paranoid style of politics.

When we imagine the worst concerning our political opponents or our enemies (sadly often placed into the same category), this is merely a reflex designed to justify our own hatreds and also a tool for broadly smearing those with whom we disagree. Clearly, this is not the same as seeking out solid evidence and using logic to construct a worst-case scenario.

In scenario planning the whole point is to consider seriously a range of possible outcomes and formulate plans for dealing with those outcomes. For example, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) reference case for world oil production (defined as crude oil and lease condensate) shows it rising from about 76 million barrels per day (mbpd) in 2012 to 99.5 mbpd in 2040. The low production case is 92 mbpd and the high production case is almost 103 mbpd.