Less than two years ago, people were claiming that the U.S. had 100 years of natural gas available, finally accessed by fracturing the rocks that held it trapped, using high water pressure. “Fracking,” they call it.

Shale gas made a significant impact. We stopped talking about importing natural gas.

So when I attended the Peak Oil Conference in Denver this past October, I took a special interest in a panel that included the CEO of a gas drilling company as well as Arthur Berman, a geologist who has been analyzing many gas wells.

What Berman found was that 70 percent of the production of a well was realized in its first year. The gas company executive was trying to say that the life of a gas well was 22 years, but I had the impression  he was being overenthusiastic about how much was left to exploit. I believed Arthur Berman.

Everyone was trying to get into the act by rushing to drill more gas wells, and the number of gas rigs increased so rapidly that the price dropped to nearly $3 per thousand cubic feet. They lost so much money that they had to drastically cut the numbers of gas rigs in operation.

Months went by, and to everyone’s shock there was a drop in production and the price shot up. What happened was just what Arthur Berman had predicted—70 percent of the average gas well had been extracted in the first year. So when they took out so many rigs a year ago, the result was a sudden drop in production volume within the year.

In this interview with Art Berman, he is not optimistic about the U.S. having a 100-year natural gas supply. Neither am I.