Slide 4 of 18
Notes:
- Some of the information includes the current state of natural gas supply. As I mentioned earlier, the OCS contributes about 27 percent of domestic gas production. This comes to about 5 trillion cubic feet (tcf) per year.
- However, this year the U.S. will consume about 23 tcf of gas and a number of recent forecasts predict that the demand for gas will rise to somewhere between 31 and 41 tcf per year by 2015.
- As you can see, to keep the OCS contribution at about 27 percent of domestic production, the federal OCS will need to increase production several tcf per year.
- On this slide, the red area shows production up to year 2000. After that, existing fields deplete rapidly, shown by a 10 percent per year rate of decline. That opens up a huge potential shortfall, shown in yellow.
- Of course, we all know that exploration and development of new gas fields did not end in December of 2000. However, the graph clearly shows that it is important to continue exploration for natural gas and for us to have all potential sources of natural gas on the table, including Arctic fields.
