An Odd Problem For The United States: Too Much Natural Gas

Scott Detrow

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Scott Detrow is a congressional correspondent for NPR. He also co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast.

Detrow joined NPR in 2015 to cover the presidential election. He focused on the Republican side of the 2016 race, spending time on the campaign trail with Donald Trump, and also reported on the election's technology and data angles.

Detrow worked as a statehouse reporter for member stations WITF in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and KQED in San Francisco, California. He has also covered energy policy for NPR's StateImpact project, where his reports on Pennsylvania's hydraulic fracturing boom won a DuPont-Columbia and national Edward R. Murrow Award in 2013.

April 17, 2012 | 11:45 AM

NPR takes a look at the consequences of the United States’ glut of natural gas:

Peter Ricchiuti, a professor at Tulane University in New Orleans and an expert on oil and gas production, says the normal supply-and-demand laws of economics aren’t working as they used to in the industry.
“Historically, this has always been kind of a self-governing mechanism,” Ricchiuti says. “When natural gas prices got too low, you’d start to see the industry lay down rigs until prices went back up again, and it was very effective. It was sometimes jokingly referred to as the ‘Redneck OPEC.’ ”
OPEC refers to the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, a grouping of the world’s major oil producers.
That’s not happening this time, and Ricchiuti says there are a couple of reasons the industry isn’t responding as usual to price pressures. One reason is that during the shale gas explosion of the past few years, production companies spent big bucks leasing mineral rights in vast shale gas areas from Pennsylvania to Texas.