At the same time, natural gas consumption is skyrocketing.
This is why Royal Dutch Shell expects US natural gas prices to double by 2015.
It’s only common sense to expect the drilling, and the consumption infrastructure, to both adjust to the cost of horizontal drilling and fracking, as well as the actual lifetime production of a fracked well. This is a process, not an event. Unless of course we simply let Genius Obama determine the price by fiat.
When you consider the need we have felt for a Strategic Petroleum Reserve, actually there could be a case to be made for the government to put a thumb on the scale to bias the market toward domestic production in preference to imports from the ME.
I do not want government picking winners. It has always worked out as a bad idea. That is far different from maintaining a Strategic Petroleum Reserve which is designed to ride through upsets/disruptions, not change the long term market.