Oil and natural gas are the lifeblood of our economy, accounting for more than 60 percent of the energy consumed in the United States. To meet projected demand, our Nation has a vital interest in ensuring that competitively-priced domestic natural gas and oil remain part of the U.S. energy portfolio for decades to come. Read More.

While domestic resources remain plentiful, increasingly, these resources are concentrated in geologically challenging and operationally complex settings such as deep formations, deepwater offshore, and lower permeability formations. Their recovery requires innovative exploration and production technologies, along with sustained attention to environmental protection.

Through NETL, scientists and engineers in government and industry are focusing on innovative solutions to these challenges. NETL supports research, development, and field demonstrations of advanced technologies to enhance near-term and mid-term supplies through the efficient use of the nation's existing resources. NETL also performs analyses of natural gas and petroleum issues to support policy decisions and to ensure a balanced R&D portfolio.

• To help industry increase supplies of oil and gas in the near term, NETL focuses on developing low-cost technologies to expand the economic life expectancy of individual wells, spurring innovations to find and tap missed or bypassed reservoirs in the field, and transferring new technology to the thousands of small and independent operators that account for the lion’s share of the U.S. industry.
• Over the mid term, NETL’s E&P efforts target critical emerging resources -- such as tight gas, deep gas, and heavy oil -- that are currently poorly understood and underutilized. These unconventional and emerging resources require the application of new technologies to make recovery economic. Such efforts have borne fruit in the past. Earlier DOE-funded research has catalyzed an unconventional natural gas industry that currently accounts for 30 percent of the Nation’s gas supply—a share expected to grow.
• Sustaining natural gas and oil supplies over the long term will require adding fundamental new sources to the nation's resource base. As a result, NETL is leading a national R&D effort to evaluate methane hydrates and other potential future resources that may one day contribute to our nation’s supply demands.

• Secure and reliable energy supplies
  The United States is home to an abundant supply of both natural gas and oil, yet there exists a supply and demand gap because much of the conventional resource base has been harvested. Future sources of supply will come from more remote locations, increasingly complex and deeper reservoirs, and more environmentally sensitive areas. New technologies will certainly be needed to develop these resources in an environmentally and economically acceptable manner. With advanced technologies, our Nation can continue producing these valuable domestic resources while also meeting environmental protection goals.
  

  	America's demand for natural gas is expected to grow as much as 50% by 2025. Unconventional gas resources, much of which currently are not economically recoverable, are expected to bear much of the burden of meeting this demand.

• Clean power generation
  The clean-burning properties of natural gas make it a preferred fuel for power generation. Indeed, natural gas consumption in the power generation sector is projected to increase from 5.0 trillion cubic feet in 2003 to 9.4 trillion cubic feet in 2025. Cost-effective production, processing, transmission, and storage technologies will enable natural gas to fulfill this central role in meeting our Nation’s growing electricity needs.