But we've got a world-class gas resource here".
Cuadrilla believes that Lancashire's Bowland basin has the potential to become a leading shale gas resource.
Subsequent disagreements over pricing cost the Russians access to the enormous Turkmenian gas resource base.
The unconventional oil and gas resource closest to traditional reserves production is coal-based methane drilling.
The main hope for finding supplies to meet that demand in the long term is the Gulf of Mexico, the country's single largest natural gas resource.
A British Geological Survey study of shale gas across northern England estimated a shale gas resource of 1,300 trillion cubic feet.
A reasonable case can be made that the gas resource is too important to ignore, but also that the environmental issues are too important to dismiss.
In 2009 the IEA estimated the "long-term global recoverable gas resource base" at 850 trillion cubic metres (tcm), against 400tcm only a year earlier.
But it also concluded that "the U.S. shale gas resource has enormous potential to provide economic and environmental benefits for the country".
But energy companies and the White House see coal-bed methane from the interior West, the country's second-largest gas resource, as a vital part of the short-term solution.
Phil Corbett at RBS said the news was a small positive for the company: The main value in the field remains the gas resource which lies in deeper Jurassic intervals and will be the subject of subsequent releases.
