Facts don’t matter. That’s the only conclusion that can be made by looking at two of President Barack Obama’s recent speeches on energy.

It’s not just that Obama continues to repeat the fictions about biofuels. When Obama was a senator, and when he was running for the White House, he was a leading booster of corn ethanol. Now, he’s switched his rhetoric to promote what he is calling “sustainably grown biofuels” – whatever that is.

Of course, Obama is still promoting wind and solar. He’s been doing that for a long time, too. Obama always mentions wind and solar even though those two sources now provide a grand total of about 0.2% of total US primary energy.

On the positive side, Obama is talking about the need for nuclear power and he’s been doing so for months. In an April 2009 speech in Prague, he said “We must harness the power of nuclear energy on behalf of our efforts to combat climate change.”

All of that said, the truly disheartening omission in Obama’s energy rhetoric is his apparent refusal to accept the fact that the US has entered a new paradigm when it comes to natural gas. After decades of thinking that the US was running out of gas and that it would need to import increasing amounts of liquefied natural gas from overseas, the US now has a surfeit of gas. Over the past two years, several reports have put potential US gas resources on par with the gas reserves of Iran, Russia, and Qatar. In July 2008 Navigant Consulting put potential US natural gas resources at 2,247 Tcf. A few months later, another consulting firm, ICF International, estimated U.S. gas resources at 1,830 Tcf.

While those studies are important, the latest estimate by the Potential Gas Committee, a US non-profit organization, likely carries the most weight. On June 18, the committee issued a report that estimated US gas resources at 2,074 Tcf – the highest resource evaluation in the committee’s 44-year history. The estimate was a 35% increase over the estimate published in 2007, and like the reports from Navigant and ICF, it pointed to the boom in shale gas as a key reason for the big hike in the resource estimate.

The lead author of the report, John Curtis, a professor in geology and geological engineering at the Colorado School of Mines, said the reasons for the big increase in resource estimates were obvious: “new and advanced exploration, well drilling and completion technologies are allowing us increasingly better access to domestic gas resources—especially ‘unconventional’ gas—which, not all that long ago, were considered impractical or uneconomical to pursue.”

Now to be clear, resources are not reserves. In oilfield parlance, a “resource” is something that’s probably out there. “Reserves” is a legal term that applies to in-the-ground hydrocarbons that have been surveyed by drilling and other agreed-upon techniques. Nevertheless, the quantity of the resource is gargantuan. The 2,000 trillion cubic feet estimate from the Potential Gas Committee means that the US is sitting atop the energy equivalent of more than 360 billion barrels of crude oil, or roughly as much as the known oil reserves of Saudi Arabia and Venezuela combined.

Last week, Mark Papa, the CEO of Houston-based EOG Resources, one of America’s biggest gas producers, told me that the shale gas revolution in the industry has resulted in a “massive sea change” in the industry’s outlook. “In last five years, the industry has found what will easily be at least a 100 year supply of gas. And in next five years, we may find an incremental 50 years on top of that.”

The benefits of using more natural gas are obvious. When burned it emits about half as much carbon dioxide as coal. Unlike coal, it produces zero solid waste, zero heavy metals, and zero air pollutants. While natural gas has made almost no headway in the US transportation market, a sustained program on natural gas vehicles could allow the US to substitute some natural gas for gasoline in the light vehicle market and for diesel fuel in the heavy truck sector. (This is the one — and only — topic about which T. Boone Pickens is right.)

Producing – and using — more natural gas in the US would increase employment, and increase the amount of royalties being paid to US mineral owners. Using more domestic gas could, over the long run, help reduce US oil imports, improve the balance of trade, and strengthen the economy.

But it appears that Obama either doesn’t know the facts, or he doesn’t want to let them get in the way of his promotion of “green” energy. In an October 23 speech at MIT, Obama mentioned natural gas one time, but only in passing, and his reference to gas implies that natural gas is an outdated technology:

Everybody in America should have a stake in legislation that can transform our energy system into one that’s far more efficient, far cleaner, and provide energy independence for America — making the best use of resources we have in abundance, everything from figuring out how to use the fossil fuels that inevitably we are going to be using for several decades, things like coal and oil and natural gas; figuring out how we use those as cleanly and efficiently as possible; creating safe nuclear power; sustainable — sustainably grown biofuels; and then the energy that we can harness from wind and the waves and the sun.

Four days later, on October 27, in a speech delivered at a new solar power facility in Florida, Obama didn’t mention natural gas at all. Instead, his focus was, once again on the “clean energy economy.”

There is something big happening in America when it comes to creating a clean energy economy…I have often said that the creation of such an economy is going to require nothing less than the sustained effort of an entire nation — an all-hands-on-deck approach similar to the mobilization that preceded World War II or the Apollo Project. And I also believe that such a comprehensive piece of legislation that is taking place right now in Congress is going to be critical. That’s going to finally make clean energy the profitable kind of energy in America — legislation that will make the best use of resources we have in abundance, through clean coal technology, safe nuclear power, sustainably grown biofuels, and energy we harness from the wind, waves, and sun.

Obama’s speech in Florida is particularly telling. The president went out of his way to talk about “clean coal technology” – which probably exists on the same imaginary planet as “sustainably grown biofuels” – but natural gas didn’t merit a mention.

Of course, the US gas industry, and the new lobbying/advocacy organization, America’s Natural Gas Alliance, are working hard in Washington to make some headway. But the gas producers are vastly outmatched by the coal producers. As Papa told me, “The coal lobby outweighs us by several multiples in terms of clout.”

In politics, facts should matter. And perhaps ANGA and the rest of the US gas industry will eventually be able to get their voices heard in Washington. But if Obama’s recent speeches are any indication, the facts about America’s wealth of natural gas are going to remain unrecognized for a while to come.

Original file here: http://www.energytribune.com/articles.cfm?aid=2510