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Page down and you'll see the links underneath the ad for the CD and book. They're in MP3 format or you can view transcripts as well. www.globalpublicmedia.com/INTERVIEWS/MATT.SIMMONS/ Q1: I'd like to ask you about why you have more concerns than some people about the state of the global gas supply, not just the North American natural gas supply.
There are a litany of reasons. Start with the fact that every serious long-term-energy forecast comes to the same conclusion, that natural gas needs to grow twice as fast as oil, because the whole world has finally realized that natural gas is the world's single-best source of energy; it's the most efficient, it has the least yield loss as you convert it from dry gas into usable energy; light a match and you got energy. It's the cleanest, and we now know how to transport it, either by pipeline or through cryogenic liquefaction, so you can actually get it anyplace. So the numbers on the projected demand are just absolutely enormous. What we don't have much data on is on the supply side, because the amount of analysis and data on the supply side for gas pales in comparison to what we have in oil, which isn't very good.
What worries me is that we are making the assumption in all of the proved reserves that are being batted around that that gas is actually proven-gas reserves, and a vast, vast amount of it has never seen a drill bit. In other words, they're just assumptions that those reserves are there. And the reason that there hasn't been any drilling is there has never been a transportation system, and when something is un-commercial, it doesn't tend to lend itself to people spending a lot of money to find out just how real it was, so that's my second concern, is that we might find that this vast amount of stranded gas was just an illusion.
The third reason I’m worried is that you can basically go down a list of key-gas producers by country and see very clearly that quite a few of the key-gas producer’s current supply is in decline: the United States, Canada, the U.K., Netherlands, Indonesia, Russia. Now that doesn’t mean in all those countries it will always be in decline, but it means categorically that what is now being produced is in decline. I've just rattled off 65% of the world's gas supply that is now in decline, so if you got a top line that needs to grow by even 20%, and a bottom line where 65% is in decline, and you're not even quite sure of the rate at which the decline is accelerating, and natural gas tends to always decline far faster than oil, because the heavier the oil is, the harder it is too have any fast decline, and gas is a vapor (it can decline real fast), so you add all those things up and say that we need an infinitely greater amount of data on our global-gas situation, because we didn’t see peaking in the United States in gas until 3 decades after the event happened.MATT SIMMONS Interviewed by Julian Darley on May 19, 2004
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