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NG is a dicey matter.

Every once in a while I post a link to the bible of energy that is released by BP (they outsourced to a proxy of late) that lists country by country reserves and production of oil, gas, coal . . . whatever. They have done this every June for about 70 yrs.

The US NG reserves are about 12.7 trillion cubic meters. That includes shale estimates.

This is not a huge number as such things go. The big kahuna of NG is Russia at 32+ Tcm. Then Iran and Qatar share that huge gas field underneath the Persian Gulf and are both in the 20s Tcm.

The frown inducer is production. The US is extracting about 1 Tcm from the ground each year. It gets domestically consumed or a small portion of that is exported.

So 12ish Tcm in the ground and taking out 1 Tcm per year. How can this be good?

The kneejerk is to rage that yeah I’ve heard it is running out for decades. It’s all bullshit — which is a conclusion that must necessarily think it is somehow infinite.

Were that so, or even considered possible, BP would not be publishing annual numbers.

Will more be found? Yes. The big source of “more” has been shale. It was always known to be there, but only low interest rates starting about 2012 enabled fracking to get underway flowing oil — and with that oil, gas flowed too. But this is not forever. It’s simply not.

Here’s the link.
Energy Institute Statistical Review of World Energy
The Energy Institute Statistical Review of World Energy™ analyses data on world energy markets from the prior year. Previously produced by bp, the Review has been providing timely, comprehensive and objective data to the energy community since 1952.

https://www.energyinst.org/statistical-review

There is both a .pdf and lower in the scroll a button that says Download The Data. That Download button is for a spreadsheet that any Excel reader can access. If you care at all about all this, get this annual data.