Enough to go around
OU Energy Symposium panelists highlighted the ongoing demand for all forms of energy, including oil, natural gas, wind and solar.
Technology, consumer trends and government policies are leading to vast changes throughout the global energy industry, but the sector promises to support many various jobs for decades to come, industry experts said Thursday.
Speaking at the University of Oklahoma Energy Symposium, panelists highlighted the ongoing demand for all forms of energy, including oil, natural gas, wind and solar. “There’s a space in the market for everyone,” said Joseph Stanislaw, senior partner at Bright Star Capital Partners. “We need all forms of energy. Technology is producing low-cost wind and solar and more environmentally responsible oil and gas. It’s all technology, and it’s all moving in the same direction. They’re not enemies.”
Friend or foe?
While there may be demand to support several forms of energy, the technology that has created multiple sources of viable energy also has given consumers new choices, said Mike Ming, vice president and executive liaison for marketing technology at Baker Hughes, a GE company. “Renewables and hydrocarbons absolutely should be friends, but the reality of the market is that they’re many times foes because they’re competing with the same consumer to purchase it,” he said.
There is plenty of global demand for both renewals and fossil fuels, Ming said, but consumers now can decide what fuel they want their cars to run on and businesses and some consumers can choose to support renewable power when they buy their electricity.
“For years, all we had to do was produce our product, and people bought it,” Ming said. “Now they have a choice. We have to engage with continual improvement. We have to lower carbon emissions.”
Shale gas goes global
Technology also is creating new markets for both new and traditional forms of energywhile radically shifting global patterns in the process.
“Shale natural gas helped unlock restricted regional gas markets and make natural gas a global commodity,” Stanislaw said. “Our shale gas produced a global gas market because the gas needed a place to go. We broke it open and created a global natural gas market. People said it couldn’t be done, that it all had to be connected by pipe. But our supply did it.”
U.S. producers now are exporting about 3.3 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day. Projects under construction are expected to boost that capacity by the end of 2019 to about 10 billion cubic feet per day, or about 13 percent of total U.S. consumption.
U.S. natural gas is available to the global market at a time when global demand is surging. While total energy demand has slowed in the United States and other developed economies, much of the world still uses wood and other such fuels for heating and cooking. said Andrew Bradford, CEO of BTU Analytics LLC.
There also is plenty of room for natural gas to displace coal, with coal representing 65 percent of power generation in China and 77 percent in India, he said. “I am surprised by the pessimism I hear about the longevity of oil and gas careers,” Bradford said. “In my opinion, the future of hydrocarbons is bright. There are all sorts of runways out there. Globally, there is huge opportunity in the developing world for natural gas.”