Bruce Pile

Smells Good: The Case for Natural Gas

In addition to the monstrous advantages you point out for NG over oil, which to recap are:
1. Over 5 times cheaper per BTU
2. Much cleaner for the environment, thus much more likely to
get favorable legislation enacted in any energy policy
3. Redirects 700 billion dollars a year away from often
unfriendly foreign governments
you also have the basic fact that over the next 20 years or so, global gas production, and thus LNG trade, is going to be growing briskly while net exports of oil are going to be accelerating a downtrend already in place! Peak gas is projected to be around 2030 while peak oil is happening now and, more importantly, peak oil exports is probably history already. Just look at a chart of LNG trade and compare it to what net exports of oil have done over the last few years. One is rolling over into a decline per the ELM (Export Land Model) while the other is climbing sharply to a peak decades away.

Historically, there has always been a tight correlation between oil price and natural gas price because of the rampant interchangability between the two in industry. When gas lags as far behind oil is it is presently doing, there is always a sharp slingshot move in gas to catch up with what oil is doing, which usually overshoots oil briefly. This seems to happens every 3 years or so, and if it happens again, it would take the price of gas to over $25.

In addition to the usual industrial switchover activity from crude to NG, you are probably going to have a lot of transportation switchover this cycle as well (if Boone Pickens has his way, that is).
If the Clean Energy model catches on, we could see an unprecedented megacycle in NG versus crude.