Plenty of natural gas, oil, exec says

BOISE — High oil and natural gas prices do not spell disaster for America's energy future, according to one local industry executive.

In fact, America and the world are not running out of oil or natural gas. They are only running out of places to look for those products, according to Keith Rattie, chief executive officer of Questar Corp., a Salt Lake-based natural gas producer and distributor.

"The truth is that planet Earth is swimming in natural gas," Rattie told 170 state regulators on Monday gathered for the 2005 Western Conference of Public Service Commissioners. "By the federal government's own estimates there are over 1,400 trillion cubic feet of technically recoverable gas reserves just in the United States. That's over 60 years' supply at today's consumption level."

Rattie's comments fly in the face of a host of other voices, warning of dire shortages as record-high oil and natural gas prices squeeze consumers and industries and threaten economic growth.

A 2003 study by the National Petroleum Council concluded that North America is fast approaching a time in which it will no longer be self-reliant in meeting its natural gas needs.

But Rattie blasted doomsday predictions of a pending calamity, instead placing the blame on federal policies and agencies that are too often swayed by public opinion and media attention.

"If, in fact, America is running out of oil and gas, it isn't the first time," Rattie said. "In fact, we were running out in the 1860s when shortages caused by the Civil War drove oil prices above $15 a barrel. That's more than $1,000 per barrel in today's dollars."

Similar scares, Rattie said, were heard in the 1890s, after World Wars I and II and during the 1970s.

"Now, entering the summer of 2005, it's deja vu all over again," Rattie said. "Each time we have one of these 'Chicken Little' episodes about energy supply, the doomsters tell us this time things are different. The rules of economics, they tell us, have somehow been repealed, and therefore we Americans are going to have to live much more soft in the future than we have in the past."

Rattie said half of the natural gas yet to be discovered lies on vast tracts of regulated federal lands, much of it in the Rockies, where 137 trillion cubic feet of gas remain off-limits.

In California and Florida, two states that, taken together, account for 15 percent of U.S. natural gas use, offshore drilling is banned.