The Future of Unconventional Gas Resources in Europe: Potential and Implications for Energy Security (ePub)

Master's Thesis from the year 2010 in the subject Energy Sciences, grade: 1.3, University of Münster (University of Muenster & RWTH Aachen University), course: Energy Economics, language: English, abstract: The European natural gas market is characterized by declining indigenous production rates of conventional gas in combination with growing consumption rates across all sectors, which both result in concerns about the future dependence on natural gas imports. The production of unconventional gas has revolutionized the natural gas market in the USA because significant contributions to the indigenous supply of natural gas have been achieved and thus, lowered their import dependence. This thesis results from the need to determine the potential of unconventional gas resources in Europe under consideration of opportunities, in terms of economic impacts and benefits to the energy security, as well as challenges that arise from technological and environmental aspects. For this purpose, a roadmap for the future unconventional gas industry in Europe is developed, which prospects different stages of an anticipated development path.

An assessment of the global distribution of unconventional gas resources is presented on the basis of introducing the natural gas resource triangle concept. Following a quantification of the entire unconventional gas resource base, the importance of natural gas from a global perspective, and subsequently from a European perspective, is analyzed. This comprehensive approach provides the overall picture of the European natural gas market until 2015 and 2030, respectively. Hereby, forecasts of the unconventional gas production rates in Europe are essentially included.

The results indicate that the sole consideration of the unconventional gas resource base in Europe does not lead to significant changes in the future indigenous natural gas supply portfolio. But, local economies in Europe benefit from several economic impacts that are accompanied by an evolving unconventional gas industry in Europe. Furthermore, it is concluded that the global production of unconventional gas acts as a lever to maintain Europe's dependence on foreign natural gas supplies.