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SHREVEPORT, LA (KSLA) – With gas prices on the rise and no end in sight, President Obama is pledging to cut oil imports by 1/3 by 2025.

On Wednesday, Obama outlined a plan to expand offshore oil and natural gas drilling to provide short-term relief and other steps that would allow the nation to transition to cleaner and cheaper sources of energy.  That means the Ark-La-Tex will likely play a major role in the nation’s energy future.

A few years ago, Angela Gale started receiving a check every few months thanks to the Haynesville Shale.

“It’s not much, but it’s a little bit here and there,” she said.

The Haynesville Shale is now the nation’s largest natural gas resource.

“Natural gas right now seems to be probably our most viable alternative source of energy. We know where it is. We know how to get it out of the ground,” said economist, David Hoaas.

Industry insiders say you could see more wells popping up and moving into urban areas, which means more people could see those royalty checks.

“I think it will help our area to continue to grow and maybe we won’t have some of the financial issues that some of these other counties and states are having,” said Gale.

A push to use more natural gas could also push the nation to make it more easily available.

“We have a good distribution system for getting it to homes for eating and cooking. What we need to do is get a distribution system for it to be viable as fuel for automobiles,” said Hoaas.

Hoaas says most people won’t see any immediate impact from this new initiative. In fact, it will probably be about a year and a half before it effects any prices at the pump, but this initiative could be what keeps us from reaching $5 a gallon.

“Any time we have an alternative energy source, we have more competition. Competition is good for consumers,” said Hoaas.

Original Article

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WASHINGTON — Vowing to reduce oil imports, President Barack Obama embraced legislation Wednesday sponsored by Oklahoma lawmakers and endorsed by T. Boone Pickens to encourage the use of more natural gas vehicles.

Calling the potential for natural gas “enormous,” Obama said in a speech at Georgetown University that there’s been broad bipartisan agreement on legislation providing incentives for natural gas vehicles.

More than 150 members of Congress supported the bill, Obama said, “and they were joined by T. Boone Pickens, a businessman who made his fortune on oil, but who is out there making the simple point that we can’t simply drill our way out of our energy problems.

“So I ask members of Congress and all the interested parties involved to keep at it, pass a bill that helps us achieve the goal of extracting natural gas in a safe, environmentally sound way,” Obama said.

The president’s embrace of natural gas — which may have helped drive market prices 2 percent higher Wednesday — was accompanied by his suggestions that its extraction could pose environmental problems.

He said in his speech that he wanted to ensure natural gas could be extracted “without polluting our water supply” and that he has asked administration officials to work with others “to improve the safety of this process.”

Process draws fire

The long-used process called hydraulic fracturing, in which water, sand and chemicals are injected into rock formations to free the gas, has come under fire from environmental groups and others who charge that it poses a threat to drinking water.

The industry vehemently disputes that and has been battling against federal regulations on the process. The Environmental Protection Agency is in the midst of a lengthy study about “fracking.”

Pickens and Oklahoma lawmakers welcomed Obama’s remarks on natural gas, and Pickens predicted to reporters that the natural gas legislation would clear both houses this year.

Reps. John Sullivan, R-Tulsa, and Dan Boren, D-Muskogee, who have sponsored the legislation in previous Congresses, plan to do so again this year.

They said Wednesday that their bill — which would provide subsidies for the production of large natural gas vehicles — will be unveiled soon.

In a speech that offered little in the way of new proposals, the president set a goal of cutting oil imports by one-third by 2020.

Is enough being done on federal leases?

He said more oil could be produced domestically, and he sought to blame energy companies for a lack of activity on federal leases for oil and gas drilling. The energy industry strongly denies it is sitting on leases, charging that the administration has slowed permitting to the point that companies are suffering huge financial losses.

Devon Energy spokesman Chip Minty said Wednesday, “Once property is leased, there’s a lot of front-end work required to evaluate the geology, to determine if oil and natural gas is present and if it could be produced economically.

“Another consideration that the administration doesn’t seem to have acknowledged is the lengthy permitting process that exists. For example, in Wyoming, Devon can wait a year to 15 months just to get a drilling permit. And there’s one play where we’ve waited five years.”

The president also called for accelerating the production of non-corn ethanol and said Americans could do more to conserve energy.

The natural gas legislation has had strong backing in the past — last year, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was the lead sponsor — but has failed to gain approval, primarily because it has been packaged with proposals that can’t get enough support to pass.

Last year, Reid put it in a bill that also included removal of the liability cap for offshore oil spills; lawmakers like Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Tulsa, a big backer of the natural gas legislation, wound up opposing the bill because of the liability cap provisions.

Rep. James Lankford, R-Oklahoma City, said Wednesday that the president’s speech didn’t lay out a serious plan for boosting domestic production.

“His speech contained the same recycled rhetoric from two years ago, in which he vaguely described his grand strategy to meet lofty levels of alternative energy use by a date sometime in the distant future,” Lankford said.

Original Article