Energy

Natural Gas: Promoting Safe, Affordable and Reliable Energy

Recently, the American Gas Association released its 2016 Playbook, a concise description of the tremendous role the natural gas industry currently plays and is poised to continue playing in the coming years and decades. The report shows that natural gas continues to deliver safe, affordable and reliable energy, while also providing environmental, energy efficiency and national security benefits.

As natural gas prices have dropped sharply over the recent years, largely due to advances in drilling technology, customers are deriving tremendous financial savings from using natural gas. For instance, households that use natural gas for heating, cooking and drying clothes save an average of $840 per year compared to customers who use only electricity to power these same activities. Over the past four years, low natural gas prices have provided a total savings of almost $69 billion to natural gas customers, thereby allowing customers to use this money for other necessities.

The natural gas industry is also creating hundreds of thousands of jobs for hardworking Americans. The industry directly supports 622,000 jobs and indirectly supports an additional 723,000 in related industries such as agriculture and manufacturing that support and supply goods and services to the natural gas industry.

Finally, the natural gas industry has continued its longstanding culture of safety. With over 2.5 million miles of pipeline crisscrossing the United States, natural gas utilities collectively spend $22 billion annually in order to help enhance the safety of gas transmission and distribution infrastructure. In addition, the industry’s “Call 811” initiative has reduced the number of excavation damages have decreased by approximately 50 percent since 2004.

Read the full Playbook from the American Gas Association here.


In Depth: Energy

It is difficult – and perhaps even impossible – to overstate the relationship between readily available access to safe, affordable and reliable energy and individual prosperity and economic wellbeing. This is because energy is an input to virtually everything we produce, consume and enjoy in society. Think for a minute…

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