Maybe, just maybe, you can turn it into a true alternative to
oil. It wasn't all that long ago -- the 1970s -- when American
natural gas production was waning. If you look at the graph
above, production of natural gas hit a peak in the early '70s
that it did not reach again until the late '90s or supersede by
a great margin until just the past few years. Almost all of the
recent production bump has come from unconventional sources --
shale gas, most prominently. And, if the projections of Energy
Information Administration are to be believed (a subject of
legitimate debate), the United States, China, and Canada are
about to experience an explosion of natural-gas production. On
the political level, natural gas is a winner on the right and
(most of) the left as a domestic fuel that also (with some
disputes) generates less CO2 when burned. So, let's take this
bounty at face value and say that we're going to be awash in
natural over the next few decades at a time when oil production
-- especially in the US -- is i