d and counter productive pricing regulations handcuffed the industry. The picture today is decidedly different. Natural gas is being counted on to fuel most of America’s economic expansions way into the 21st century. The regulations of the 1970s have been replaced by a restructured gas market, and the industry has responded. The demand for gas is growing faster than anyone predicted. The United States economy is also growing faster. Environmental regulations that favor natural gas consumption are more firmly in place and are becoming much stronger. More than half of the growth for natural gas, over the next 20 years, will come from the electric generation market. The use of natural gas in this country could increase by more than a third in the next 20 years. In the electric power generation industry, natural gas could increase as much as 250 percent for power generation.The United States now has two percent of the world’s proven crude-oil reserves. Most of the American produced oil comes form old wells, where the output declines over the years. Production costs are lower overseas, so it is cheaper to buy from OPEC nations than from many American suppliers. Increasing energy supplies requires not only wells but new pipelines to transport oil and natural gas. In 1998, the United States consumed 9.8 million more barrels of oil a day than it produced.The economic miracles of the 20th century were powered by fossil fuels. The 21st century may be seen by an equally dramatic change from fossil fuels, and the environmental chaos they brought. The result may be less than an energy revolution. The cost of fossil fuel energy produced is comparable to that of electricity. A fuel cell cleanly and quietly combines oxygen and hydrogen to produce electricity. Fuel cells could one day sit in thousands of basements producing power and hot water, without fossil fuels. Some fossil fuel lobbyists still argue that it will be di...
