{"id":14719,"date":"2012-07-10T11:58:35","date_gmt":"2012-07-10T16:58:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/?p=14719"},"modified":"2012-07-10T12:03:00","modified_gmt":"2012-07-10T17:03:00","slug":"how-exxonmobil-sees-the-future-of-energy-an-interview-with-steve-coll","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/2012\/07\/10\/how-exxonmobil-sees-the-future-of-energy-an-interview-with-steve-coll\/","title":{"rendered":"How ExxonMobil Sees the Future of Energy: An Interview with Steve Coll"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Photo by Eric Thayer\/Getty Images<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

What will the future of energy look like? Will natural gas make a rebound? What about oil? Will our dependency on it continue, or will it wane?<\/p>\n

We recently put some of these questions to Steve Coll of the New Yorker<\/em>, whose new book, Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power<\/a> looks at the oil giant and its role in the energy economy. Where the Texas-headquartered company goes next, and how it prioritizes its development, can offer insight on where our energy future as a whole is headed.<\/p>\n

Coll notes that ExxonMobil has made huge investments in unconventional oil and gas in the United States, most notably with their purchase of the Fort Worth company XTO in 2010<\/a>, one of the largest producers of unconventional natural gas deposits in the country. “ExxonMobil\u00a0produces so much oil and gas every day, so just replacing the amount they produce and sell and remaining whole without shrinking is an enormous challenge,” Coll says. ExxonMobil also has had to look for oil and gas in developing countries like Nigeria, and in unconventional ways in the United States and Canada.<\/p>\n

You can read the first two parts of our interview here<\/a> and here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Q: <\/span>I think if you look at natural gas right now, people are really concerned. Hitting the lowest prices it\u2019s seen in a decade<\/a> in April. And people are saying: ‘Well, we\u2019ve really developed this rapidly, and we\u2019ve got this huge glut of natural gas now, and there\u2019s not a lot of ways to use it.’ So I was curious: why you think Exxon Mobil made that choice to develop so much natural gas?<\/p>\n

A: <\/span>Well, I think they looked out over the next 30 or 40 years and they saw through their kind of projections of electric power demand in the United States, the future of the economy, and also the constraints on heavy carbon fuels like coal and also oil as a result of rising concerns about global warming,\u00a0they assumed that eventually a price on carbon would come into play in the United States. All of that led them to natural gas.<\/p>\n

Natural gas has a relatively low carbon footprint if it\u2019s produced efficiently, and it\u2019s flexible. It’s useful for electric power generation, useful for feed stock, useful potentially for transportation by converting bus fleets. So I think the criticism they\u2019ve received is not that they\u2019ve made the strategic bet, because I think the sense that gas has a future in the United States seems pretty persuasive. It\u2019s that maybe they bought in at the top of the market when they bought XTO. Gas prices have collapsed.<\/p>\n

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