Frank Verrastro

Energy Policy Debate: Fossil Fuels vs. Renewables

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Energy tax policy and regulation – what they are and what they should be – are the critical issues for the Presidential candidates, diverse energy experts agreed.

As with the candidates themselves, that was pretty much the end of the agreement in a Washington debate hosted by the American Petroleum Institute (API) Vote4Energy campaign. The experts split, politely, over what’s happening now and what that portends for the future, 40 years after the first oil embargo shocked Americans into paying attention to energy. Keep reading →

 /  Published September 28, 2012 at 8:30 AM

Energy in the State of the Union: Not a Bad Place to Start

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President Barack Obama delivered the State of the Union address to Congress in late January. The speech is being characterized by many in the media as many things: populist in tone, a campaign year positioning speech, and a mild tongue-lashing for Congress. While all of these things may or may not be true, for those of us in the energy world, the speech had some notable energy components worth mentioning.

First, the very fact that energy played a prominent role in the president’s framing of key measures to help build an “America built to last” is important and correct. Affordable and reliable energy has always been a staple of American economic growth and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. With all of the other issues plaguing government right now, energy could easily have been downgraded to a lesser priority, but it wasn’t. Keep reading →

 /  Published February 24, 2012 at 3:00 PM

US Shale Gas Development May Be Tough To Copy

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The unique structure of the US natural gas industry enabled development and rapid deployment of new shale gas technology, and the lack of that structure is complicating efforts of other countries to follow suit.

That’s according to Laszlo Varro, head of the Gas, Coal & Power Division at the International Energy Agency, speaking at the Center for Strategic & International Studies recently. Keep reading →

 /  Published January 17, 2012 at 6:00 AM

The Risks Of Doing Nothing With US Oil And Gas Reserves

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Just how quickly domestic US oil and gas plays can begin moving products to market remains a vital question following the Arab Spring, when political changes across the Middle East and North Africa put one third of the world’s oil and natural gas liquids at risk, prompting stockpile releases coordinated by the International Energy Agency.

Planning for new infrastructure spending and other capacity is extremely challenging given the volatile pricing that dependency on a limited number of foreign oil and natural gas sources entails, Frank Verrastro of the Center for Strategic and International Studies says in this video, an edited version of his presentation to the US Association for Energy Economics summit in Washington, DC earlier this year. Keep reading →

 /  Published November 23, 2011 at 6:00 AM