Predicting the future is hard, I get it, but it shocks me how abysmally wrong some of the smartest people in the business can be, even with the best information.
For example, in a recent interview with EnergyWire John Rowe, chairman emeritus of Chicago-based Exelon Corp. and a long-time big thinker in the utility industry, acknowledged that he and his executive team essentially missed the coming shale gas revolution: “What we didn’t see, even as late as ’08, we just didn’t see what shale gas was going to do to gas prices. Some of our downside scenarios were at $4 [per mmBtu] gas. We did not see below $3 gas. … I have a wound on my neck from that one.”
Rowe is hardly alone in having missed the explosion in shale gas production. As I pointed out here, EIA’s 2004 Annual Energy Outlook didn’t even mention the Marcellus and Utica shale resources. Pity that, since output from Marcellus has jumped from basically nothing a decade ago to 16 billion cubic feet a day this year—accounting for roughly 13 percent of overall U.S. output.
Continue reading Out On A Limb:
Energy Storage To Track
Rapid Development
Of Marcellus Shale, PV