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Natural gas woes bigger story than crude oil



Mella McEwen
Oil Editor
Midland Reporter Telegram
09/25/2005

Having seen his prediction that crude oil prices would reach $65 a barrel become reality, Dr. Michael Economides is making equally bold predictions about natural gas. Natural gas prices, he said Wednesday while visiting Midland to address the Permian Basin section, Society of Petroleum Engineers, will reach $20 per thousand cubic feet (Mcf) around Christmas.

Having forecast $65 oil, he said, he's now predicting $100 oil "but I'm not impressed with that. Natural gas is the real story."

Economides, professor at the Cullen College of Engineering at the University of Houston and managing partner in a petroleum engineering and strategy consulting firm, lists several reasons for his expectations of high energy prices. One is the "perfect storm" of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Rita's approach has, as of Wednesday afternoon, knocked out 73 percent of the Gulf of Mexico's oil production as personnel were evacuated from offshore rigs and production platforms. On Tuesday, the U.S. Minerals Management Service survey of Gulf of Mexico natural gas wells found that 3.3 percent of gas production has been shut-in as a result of Hurricane Katrina three weeks ago. There is, he said, 3.5 million cubic feet of Gulf of Mexico natural gas production off-line that likely won't be back on the markets by Christmastime.

"What's going to happen is we're going to have a huge shortfall of natural gas and around Christmas there will be a bad present for the Midwest," he observed. That comes at a time, Economides said, when the nation is transitioning from crude oil to natural gas use and domestic production is already struggling to meet rising demand. "Over the next 20 years," he said, "we will have a 25 percent increase in natural gas demand for just electric power generation. Of that, 21 percent will be for new plants and 4 percent to replace coal and nuclear plants."

That means, continued Economides, who has recently appeared on national business news programs discussing energy prices, that over that 20-year period, natural gas demand will rise another 10 trillion cubic feet -- to about 33 Tcf -- and "this means liquefied natural gas will be the only solution." Never before, he noted, has natural gas reached $12 per Mcf, as it has in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. But, he said, even if Katrina and, now Rita, had not stormed through the Gulf of Mexico, the energy markets had problems meeting demand.

He cites other issues impacting energy markets, both domestic and global. Domestically, tight refining capacity is a "disaster," he said, adding that "no doubt" additional refining capacity would have eased supply shortages that sent gasoline prices to $3 per gallon after Katrina damaged Gulf Coast refineries and pipelines that sent supplies to the Midwest and Northeast. Globally the United States is going to have to increasingly compete with other nations for oil and natural gas supplies. China, Economides pointed out, increased oil demand 20 percent in 2004 and will increase demand 20 percent this year. The producing members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, despite promising this week to increase production by 2 million barrels, has no excess production capacity, he said, and tensions between the United States and major producers Iran and Venezuela could jeopardize supplies from those two countries.

Another major producing country, Russia, has regressed to what Economides called the Brezhnev era with the state takeover of Yukos, once Russia's largest oil company, and the jailing of its founder, Mikhail Khodorkovsky. That, he said, puts over 50 percent of Russia's oil production capability in government hands and "that's a serious deficiency." He chided the Bush administration for not forcefully opposing the Russian government's actions, saying the administration should be blasting Russian President Vladmir Putin. "The Bush administration was not stern with Putin, who is a bigger threat than Saddam Hussein was," Economides stated.

All these factors have combined to form what Economides called a "perfect storm -- a double Category 5 perfect storm" to drive prices higher. And next month, he predicted, oil companies will have a major public relations disaster on their hands as they begin reporting historically high third quarter profits that will be "obscene even by our obscene standards." He suggested that the major producers will have to take action, perhaps pooling large sums of money to fund research into alternative energy sources, anything to fend off calls for a new Windfall Profits Tax. There have been calls for the return of the tax, but, Economides scoffed, "it didn't work the first time, why would it work now?"

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