Op-ed: Natural Gas to the Rescue

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This month I’m planning to take the stage and open up the annual DUG East Conference & Exhibition in downtown Pittsburgh. The conference comes at a particularly crucial time for the U.S. natural gas sector, one that has the promise to propel it to new heights and as a worldwide provider of energy security. But the path is littered with obstacles and challenges.

When the natgas industry descends on western Pennsylvania this year, it will be in the immediate wake of the state’s crucial senate primary and at the beginning of the campaign to the midterm election in November. Those elections, particularly in the Marcellus region, will be partly centered on the increase of shale gas production. With Russia’s war on Ukraine driving energy LNG demand from the west into high gear, U.S. producers are figuring out how to increase production to meet that demand while dealing with the rising costs of supplies, roadblocks on infrastructure and political discord. But rest assured, the opportunity for U.S. natgas producers has arrived as long as they can figure out how to increase production while still decreasing carbon emissions.

“The events unfolding in Eastern Europe … highlight the crucial role our industry can play in the energy security of the globe,” Chesapeake Energy Corp. CEO Nick Dell’Osso told analysts on a call earlier this year. “Being in a position to do so with as low a carbon footprint as we can is more important than ever.”

Chesapeake is all in on natgas having purchased the Chief Oil & Gas in the Marcellus and Vine Energy in the Haynesville.

And, producers are itching to get their product on vessels heading to demand markets overseas. “We’re pretty excited about the ability to take some of our molecules and get them on the water,” Chesapeake’s CFO Mohit Singh, added in the analyst call.

Meanwhile, as you can read in my extensive Q&A with EQT Corp. CEO Toby Rice in this issue, the head of the country’s largest natgas producer is on a mission to help people understand why U.S. LNG is poised to meet demand brought upon by war while also being the catalyst for cutting world emissions.

This is a story that isn’t going anywhere, and there is so much more to talk about. And, we will.

Hart Energy is launching a new natural gas conference in Houston on Sept. 27. We’re calling it America’s Natural Gas, and the purpose is to bring together all of the major players in the upstream, midstream and downstream to discuss the benefits of U.S. natural gas to energy security at home and abroad. We’ll also discuss how natural gas is, as EQT’s Rice likes to say, “the greatest greenhouse gas initiative on the planet.”

We’re expecting some big names on the stage. From top executives to government representatives, we’re planning to really get after the issues surrounding America’s natural gas opportunities. We’ll be doing so in the throes of the campaign, so it’s bound to get interesting.

We’re looking forward to it, and we hope to see you there.