tinyurl.com/d5qo9 -> www.usnews.com/usnews/biztech/articles/051219/19energy.htm
But they don't fool an unemployed woman on the Crow Indian Reserv ation, using the electric oven to warm her house on increasingly crisp M ontana nights because her natural-gas heat has been cut off. And on e retiree in a mobile home in Millinocket plans to take her asthma medic ation once daily instead of three times as prescribed, to save money to pay the kerosene bills that will soar in Maine's bitter cold.
Digging for black gold With the season's first snowfall hitting the Northeast last week, it is b ecoming apparent that Hurricanes Katrina and Rita did far more to the na tion's energy equation than spoil Labor Day vacation drives. The storms upset the already precarious balance of the nation's supply and demand f or fuel. So much Gulf of Mexico oil and natural gas production remains i n disarray that even with a mild winter, Americans face a Big Chill: ast ronomical heating bills--on average, 38 percent higher than last year's record costs for natural gas and 21 percent higher for oil. That means hundreds of closed factories and enormous hards hip for low-income and working poor families, who can expect scant feder al government help. And if bitter cold rides in on Mother Nature's coatt ails, extraordinary measures will be needed to keep energy flowing, part icularly in the Northeast, as natural-gas shortages spill over into oil and electricity supplies. We have a prayer ch ain going," says Diane Munns, an Iowa regulator who is president of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners. "People are ta lking not just about high prices but actual shortages." Adds Matthew Simmons, a prominent Houston energy investment banker, who h as warned of a new era of scarcity: "We're headed into a winter that cou ld be a real winter of discontent." Damage to rigs, pipelines, and processing fac ilities means a shortage of natural gas, the fuel that heats 52 percent of US homes. The industry says 23 billion cubic feet per day, or 23 p ercent of the Gulf of Mexico's natural-gas production, will be offline t hrough March. But even before the deadly storms struck, the country was consuming more natural gas than it produced and prices were at record hi ghs. Demand grew nearly 16 percent from 1990 through 2004, driven mainly by the companies that generate electric power. Policymakers viewed natu ral gas as cleaner than coal and more palatable than nuclear, so it was easy to get required government approvals to build much-needed electric power plants that run on natural gas. And everyone bet heavily--and inco rrectly--that prices would stay cheap. The United States now relies on C anadian imports by pipeline and has begun to call on a new source, tanke rs from Africa and the Middle East filled with liquefied natural gas, or LNG. "The hurricanes--they hit a s ick patient," says Roger Cooper, executive vice president of the America n Gas Association, representing utilities. If we were hit in the 1990s, we would not have been in this situation. But when yo u are consuming 100 percent of your supply, there's not much room to man euver."
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