On Friday, T Boone Pickens entitled an article “Swimming in Natural Gas” playing off a similar quote from the Wall Street Journal. (It is also sounds similar to, er, my coulumn I wrote last month that the world is swimming in oil as stocks had increased driving down the price of oil.)
In his piece, he lays out part of the case for investing more heavily in natural gas. He believes the US now has the capability to tap trillions of cubic feet of natural gas, which could help reduce US reliance on imported energy and, therefore, bolster national security.
Natural gas is an important part of the United State’s future energy portfolio and could help offset our need for imported oil. But energy self-sufficiency by itself does not make us invulnerable to the demand of the international energy market. It is hard to imagine how the US would be secure in a world where we could meet our energy needs when many other nations could not — especially with the large role US companies play in the global energy market. Nations starved of energy would engage in a race for global resources that would likely lead to regional, if not global conflict. Security is more than ensuring the US can meet its needs; it’s also enabling a robust global energy market.