Natural Gas News – March 28, 2018

Natural Gas News – March 28, 2018

Natural gas: An Underrated Driver of Saudi Hostility Towards Iran and Qatar

Therealnews.com reported: Debilitating hostility between Saudi Arabia and Iran is about lots of things, not least who will have the upper hand in a swath of land stretching from Central Asia to the Atlantic coast of Africa. While attention is focused on ensuring that continued containment of Iran ensures that Saudi Arabia has a leg up, geopolitics is but one side of the equation. Natural gas is the other. With signatories to the Paris climate accord moving towards bans on petrol and diesel-driven vehicles within a matter of decades and renewable energy technology advancing in strides, natural gas takes on added significance. These global energy trends are hastening in an era in which oil will significantly diminish in importance and natural gas, according to energy scholar Sergei Paltsev, will fill gaps in the provision of renewable energy that await technological advances. Saudia Arabia’s problem is that Iran and Qatar have the gas reserves it does not.

Latin American Giant’s Hunger for Foreign Gas Ebbs Amid Oil Boom

WorldOil reported: As the global natural gas trade expands amid a boom in supplies from the U.S. to Australia, at least one major energy consumer may be sitting on the sidelines: Brazil. The nation’s imports of liquefied natural gas sank 75% over the past two years as domestic production climbed, government data show. The main culprit: Explorers from state-owned Petroleos Brasileiro SA to Royal Dutch Shell Plc are extracting more gas as a byproduct of soaring oil output from Brazil’s offshore pre-salt region, where crude is buried under layers of salt formed during the breakup of a supercontinent 160 million years ago.