API says Rocky Mountain best chance for near-term gas U.S. region

On July 16, Red Cavaney, president of the American Petroleum Institute, called on the U.S. Congress to resolve the country’s growing natural gas shortage.

Cavaney said the Rocky Mountain region can produce the most natural gas in the near-term because of its large gas reserves and its ability to bring supplies to U.S. markets within two years. He urged Congress, which is on the verge of passing a new national energy policy bill, to open more federal lands in the Rocky Mountain basins to natural gas drilling.

Cavaney also complained of obstacles to obtaining drilling permits and a lack of pipelines to move the gas from the Rocky Mountain region. (See “Enbridge wants to build gasline from Powder River” in the July 7 issue of Petroleum News.)

The U.S. Department of Energy recently completed a detailed study of one of the natural gas-bearing regions in the Rocky Mountains, the Greater Green River Basin of Wyoming and Colorado. DOE found that nearly 68 percent of the area’s technically recoverable natural gas resource – as much as 79 trillion cubic feet of natural gas – is either closed to development or under significant access restrictions.