A new report released by J.P. Morgan has set the global energy planners scurrying to re-do their spreadsheets. In an essay posted at HuffingtonPost.com T. Boone Pickens points out that the J.P. Morgan report says

North America doesn’t have 2,000 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in place. It has 8,000 trillion cubic feet. That’s four times last year’s new and improved numbers. This incredible surge in total gas resources will completely reshape the international energy landscape.

The U.S. is a net importer of liquefied natural gas from Qatar and other Middle Eastern nations. Boone says that with natural gas reserves in these quantities,

Domestic natural gas is going to be so plentiful and so cheap that liquefied natural gas carriers will stop coming to the U.S. They’ll go to India and China instead. We just won’t need them anymore.

Boone also makes the case that natural gas is now so plentiful in North America that

as America shifts from imported diesel to cleaner, cheaper domestic natural gas, our dependence on foreign oil will be drastically reduced. But natural gas can do a lot more than just power our vehicles. It can power our economy and get America back on its feet in ways no other resource can.

The Department of Energy has released the January oil import numbers and they show we continue to rely on foreign oil for about 60 percent of our needs. In January we imported 351 million barrels of oil at a cost of more than $27.5 billion. On an annual basis that means in 2010 we will again spend more than a third of a trillion dollars on foreign oil.

Boone is working hard to get the Congress to adopt the NAT GAS Act (H.R. 1835 and S. 1408) which will jump start the natural gas vehicle (NGV) industry in the United States. Boone calls the J.P. Morgan study “a game changer” which will help “end our country’s dangerous dependence on foreign oil.”

To read the entire essay in the Huffington Post, click HERE.

— The Pickens Team