The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

by Daniel Yergin

Given that synthetic fuels would be very expensive and offshore development was only just beginning, was there any other alternative to imported oil? There was. The answer could be seen at night, along the endless highways of Texas, in the bright spears of light that shot up from the flat plains. It was natural gas, considered a useless, inconvenient by-product of oil production and thus burned off—since there was nothing else to do with it. Natural gas was the orphan of the oil industry. Only a fraction of natural gas production was used, mostly in the Southwest. Yet the country appeared to have huge reserves of gas, which could well substitute for oil—or, for that matter, for coal—in residential heating and in industry. But it so lacked in markets that it was sold, on an energy basis, for only a fifth of what oil from the same well would cost.