Even though it seems like the cost of energy goes through the roof every year, there is one energy source that has plummeted in price: natural gas. It is a primarily source of heat for about 56% of residential units in the country, and many experts believe the newfound bounty of natural gas supply could keep energy prices low for the next 100 years.
Natural gas is a naturally occurring chemical that comes from the ground like oil. It is odorless and clear, and unlike oil, isn’t a liquid. It is typically captured by drilling into the ground into natural pockets of oil and gas. You may know natural gas best if you have a gas stove. When you turn on the stove, an electric spark lights the gas coming out, which creates the fire you can cook with. In homes that have gas service, there would be a gas furnace to heat the house, a gas water heater, a gas clothes dryer, and the gas stove. You may also recognize the smell of gas, though like we mentioned before, it's odorless. You can only smell natural gas because the utility company that supplies the gas adds an additive so that you can smell it in case there is a gas leak.
Natural gas had been imported into the U.S. for the last few decades in addition to local production, but a couple of years ago, large gas exploration companies combined two well-drilling techniques and found a bountiful supply of gas in a layer of the earth called “shale”. This gas was always there, but it wasn’t commercially profitable to extract it before these two techniques were merged. One technique is horizontal drilling, where by a well is drilled a few thousand feet deep and the bit is turned horizontal to drive a few miles more. The second technique is hydraulic fracturing, where chemicals and water are injected into the well at high pressure to break apart and release the natural gas. This gas flows to the surface and is captured by the drilling company. Due to improving techniques, much more gas is produced with these two combined technologies and that translates into a much lower cost for the gas that eventually flows to the end users like yourself.
Once the gas is captured, it is transported by truck or pipeline to the local serving utility in your area. That utility adds the chemical smell and feeds it into the underground pipelines that go right to your home. It is metered at your home when you use any gas appliance, which you then pay for on your bill. If you've been paying attention, you may have noticed that the cost of gas has gone down or stayed steady in the past year. Hopefully, that will continue.
But while natural gas can save you money, there are some disadvantages to this new gas boom as well. There are some issues with hydraulic fracturing as some people believe it contaminates the groundwater. Luckily, the few contamination cases that have been discovered have since been isolated and procedures are updated all the time to make drilling safer for everyone.
But for that potential drawback to natural gas usage, there are many more advantages. In addition to low costs, natural gas is much cleaner to burn than oil or coal, and more utilities are switching to gas to produce electricity, thereby reducing smog and emissions. Additionally, cars in many countries run on natural gas and more NG cars may make their way to the U.S. shores in the next decades. This gas boom has also created thousands of jobs and will create thousands more, plus it helps us get off our foreign energy dependence.
With time and experience, natural gas should become a bigger portion of our energy using future. And due to this, hopefully we will all enjoy a lifetime of lower energy costs from these remarkable technologies.
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