Natural gas is the most likely fuel for the globe’s future energy needs, but the world is behind the curve in building the infrastructure needed to transport and use it, a panel of executives and experts said at the 2025 NAPE Energy Business Conference in Houston.

“As we think about growth in global energy demand, we have a real opportunity to be a meaningful player in that,” said Ron Gusek, the new president and CEO of Liberty Energy, who succeeded former CEO and new Energy Secretary Chris Wright.

“We've been slow to get infrastructure built to the coast and support energy exports from here to around the globe, so I do think that is the most meaningful thing that will be coming in the next little while.”

Gusek and fellow NAPE panelists discussed the many potential changes coming to the energy industry, including the possibility of nuclear power playing a more prominent role in the U.S. But the talk repeatedly returned to governments taking a more encouraging stance toward infrastructure projects that balance environmental and cost concerns.

Josh Viets, Expand Energy’s COO, said the industry faces a “trilemma” of balancing cost, reliability and lower carbon emissions — with the focus increasingly on reliability.

“If you look out into parts of the country like California that have struggled with blackouts over the last decade-plus, because you have a … grid that's unreliable and often causing problems such as we've seen with fires and whatnot, society just won't accept that,” Viets said.  

“That's why we've seen in recent times society moving in a direction that starts to favor reliability, and I think that's why we feel so strongly that natural gas will play such a critical role in the energy mix moving on into the next several decades.”

Gusek said analysts have found that during the past 12 years, the world’s energy use grew from 500 exajoules to 620 exajoules. Natural gas supplied 40% of the extra load, with oil supplying 24%. Coal was third.

“Wind, solar, nuclear was way, way down there, unfortunately, but I don’t think that changes,” he said, noting that demand is expected to grow to 800 exajoules by 2050.

The problem many countries now face is that they have backed themselves into a corner, cutting emissions to the point where development is stymied, Viets said.

The Expand executive discussed a recent investor trip the company took to Europe. In Ireland, the national government has forbidden the construction of new AI data centers to conserve the power supply, he said.

In Germany, Volkswagen has considered shutting down factories because the cost of power was too high to make the plants profitable. The cost of electricity in Germany is about three to four times higher than U.S. prices.

Gusek said Germany’s struggles to provide electricity are illustrative. The country has a capacity of 200 gigawatts, more than twice the typical daily demand. However, the system is hampered because the majority of the power is provided by intermittent wind and solar sources. Often, supply threatens to fall below demand.

“It’s driving industry out of there and ultimately pushing it elsewhere, arguably to the places where energy generation is done less efficiently,” Gusek said. “So it’s probably actually driving energy use up globally along with the emissions footprint.”

For the U.S., the panelists said the Trump administration should be able to clear away some of the red tape faced by interstate transport and LNG export projects. Tara Righetti, the Occidental Chair of Energy & Environmental Policy at the University of Wyoming, said the federal government should think beyond its current policies.

“Every state has different policies and processes, and we're having a hard time building these things that are on a national scale because they're getting held up,” Righetti said. “There needs to be some kind of centralized backstop process to make sure that projects that are really critical to energy security and reliability can get built in a reasonable amount of time.”

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