After the nasty price shocks and shortages in the 1970s, U.S. industrial consumption of natural gas plunged by 30%.
Although the amount of gas used to generate electricity rose 82% between 1997 and 2010, increasing efficiency in appliances that use natural gas has led to declining consumption of gas per customer over time.
Japan imports nearly all of its oil and natural gas consumption, and the earthquake, having wreaked havoc on select nuclear power facilities, will likely result in a sustained change in the composition of Japanese energy demand, including an increased demand for oil and some refined products.
There's the slick salesman who needs billions of dollars in capital and technical know-how from the outside in order to exploit a quadrillion cubic feet of proven natural gas reserves (50 years' U.S. consumption) and 300, 000 miles of pipeline crisscrossing Russia from the Baltic border east to Tomsk in Siberia and from Uzbekistan north toward the Arctic Circle.
In the case of the Siberian gas pipeline project, Moscow was well aware of the inordinate West European dependency on Soviet natural gas supplies -- ultimately projected to exceed 60% of total European gas consumption -- which would have resulted from the successful completion of both strands of the twin 3, 600-mile pipelines connected to the West European gas grid.
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Unlike traditional "centralized" systems, distributed energy relies on small power-generating technologies like solar panels or ultra-efficient natural-gas turbines built near the point of energy consumption to supplement or displace grid-distributed electricity.
Federal acreage onshore and offshore holds more than 2, 000 trillion cubic feet of natural gas (about 75 years worth of current domestic consumption) and 229 billion barrels of oil (about 50 years worth).
Global production of natural gas in 2009 was nearly 3 trillion cubic meters while the consumption was nearly 2.9 trillion cubic meters.
With 3.2 million rigs driving the interstates and consuming 25 billion gallons of diesel annually, these developments could have strong implications for natural gas consumption.
Many coal companies such as Alpha Natural Resources and Peabody Energy Corporation are mulling over the fate of coal as consumption has continued to decline in the U.S.. Natural gas has undoubtedly given coal companies a run for their money since prices began to slide last year.
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The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that natural gas consumption for power generation will increase by 20% by 2050 and consumption of coal will decline.
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