Our Man in Washington: Natural Gas Shortage and Elections

Enlarge Image Image Gallery The existence of a natural gas shortage was a topic of debate in the early 1970s. ILLUSTRATION: FOTOLIA/AUREMAR

The Energy Crisis

Tired of hearing about the "energy crisis"? Confused by corporate graphs which show consumption skyrocketing and resources plummeting? Well, so are we. But the warnings seem to be based on irrefutable eco-logic: you can't keep taking things out of the ground without using them up eventually.

True enough, as far as it goes, but apparently too many Americans — even sophisticated editorial writers — are buying this line, advanced by the big industries, lock, stock and (excuse the pun) barrel . . . no questions asked.

Well, we have a few questions.

For starters, let's consider natural gas. The chief spokesman for the industry is the American Gas Association. This group is spending millions propagating the belief that there isn't enough incentive for companies to explore for more gas and that as a result we may soon be faced with a drastic shortage. The AGA is so convincing it has even converted its most skeptical critics.

No less a watchdog of the public trust than the Washington Post, for example, wrote in a recent editorial: "The present shortage of gas to residential customers has arisen largely because of obsolete and harmful price regulations imposed by the Federal government. Despite soaring demand, the price has been held far below the cost of competing fuels."

MOTHER'S Man in Washington begs to differ with the Washington Post. We've been doing some investigating of our own and have discovered a lot more questions than pat answers.

First some background: Unlike all other fuels, the price of gas at the source, or wellhead, is regulated by the Federal Power Commission. Gas is a premium fuel, relatively clean, and kept at a low cost to the consumer. Gas accounts for about a third of all the energy used in the country today. In the last ten years, consumption of gas has just about doubled.

Those are the facts. Now here are AGA's basic claims that we want to question.

CLAIM NO. 1: THERE IS A SHORTAGE OF GAS. This certainly seems to be the case. Right now at the FPC there are applications by companies to cut back on already promised gas. But, surprisingly enough, the shortage does not seem to be in the ground. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that there is enough undiscovered but recoverable gas "under current technological conditions" for a hundred years . . . and three times that amount in total undiscovered gas. The AGA figures are much lower. But built into them is what they call "an economic factor" that the AGA has never publicly defined. This is the cost factor to the producer by which he determines if it is profitable to extract gas. If the AGA were using an unreasonably high figure, it would cause them to underestimate the amount of recoverable gas and make the shortage appear worse than it is.