The fourth installment of our November 12 energy conference recap focuses on the exports panel, which can be viewed by clicking on the title...
The fourth installment of our November 12 energy conference recap focuses on the exports panel, which can be viewed by clicking on the title below.
Panel IV: Energy Exports: The Potential for Growth in Exports
By pioneering hydraulic fracturing in the 1980s and 1990s, George Mitchell enabled the current natural gas boom. With this in mind, the next panel discussion, moderated by the Bush Institute’s Founding Executive Director, Jim Glassman, dove into one of the unintended consequences of Mitchell’s discovery: the possibility of exporting natural gas.
With domestic energy production growing, the question of exporting crude oil and liquefied natural gas, or LNG, has become an increasingly hot topic. The United States has a 37-year-old ban on nearly all exports on crude oil and LNG; however, production projections have changed drastically and unexpectedly since such regulations were enacted. To that end, Scott Sheffield, CEO of Pioneer Natural Resources, stated that from 2008-2012, natural gas and crude oil production have risen more than 20% domestically and are expected to continue increasing with new plays coming online in the next few years such as the Bakken, Eagle Ford, and Spraberry/Wolfcamp. Together, the three plays have over 50 billion barrels of recoverable reserves. If production of these and other reserves can be taken advantage of, the U.S. will have an unprecedented opportunity to export.
