The demand for natural gas will rise as demand increases from vehicles and power plants, according to a panel of experts speaking at the Marcellus Midstream conference. The panel said it expected public transportation, rail and personal vehicles to boost demand.

"We are at the tip of this tremendous iceberg in terms of where the opportunities are," said Richard Bohr, president Whitetail Natural Gas Services LLC.

George Stark, director of external affairs at Cabot Oil & Gas, said the technology for commercial natural gas has existed for at least 20 years. Cabot has converted many of its vehicles to compressed natural gas (CNG) in an effort to spur demand for natural gas and Stark encouraged other producers to follow. "I drove a natural gas vehicle back in 1985, so this is not a new story by any means," he said.

He encouraged public and private partnerships to develop additional fueling stations which offer natural gas supplies to vehicles. The market is developing a growing number of home-fueling devices whose prices are growing continually more attractive, he said.

Lou D'Amico, president and executive director of Pennsylvania Independent Oil & Gas Association, said the best way to quickly spur natural gas demand is to encourage transportation and local trucking to use natural gas as a fuel. Another important source of demand is to encourage power producers to use more natural gas and less coal, he said. New environmental rules will likely push many utilities away from coal as a fuel and force them to look for alternatives, although some utilities "have not fully grasped this potential change," he said. "Many of the utilities have been using some rose-colored glasses about what impact the EPA will have on them," he said.

Also, permits for natural-gas-fueled power plants are relatively easy to get, but nuclear plants, by contrast, could take decades to permit, D'Amico said. And a clean coal plant could easily take "close to a decade" to permit, which would discourage its development, he said.

Thomas Murphy, co-director of Penn State Marcellus Center for Outreach and Research, said the development of nuclear power is further delayed, making natural gas more important in the short term, and agrees that another important source of demand is home heating.

"We will not see the same cyclical price that we have in the past," he said. As a result, many homeowners will likely to switch. Murphy noted that more public education is needed to translate the availability of natural gas as an alternative fuel to the average member of the public. "One way to do that is to bring non-industry vehicles in the discussion," he said. The industry needs to convince local school districts and municipalities to use additional supplies of natural gas in their fleet vehicles.

Bohr stressed that, because proved reserves in the U.S. include more than 100 years of potential supply, natural gas is not a bridge to some other alternative. "One hundred years is an awfully long bridge," he said.

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