The world uses 132 million million cubic feet
Source Energy.gov Natural Gas Study Guide
In 2017 the world used 132,290,211 million cubic feet (MMcf) of natural gas per year.
That worked out to 17,527 cubic feet per person every year (2017 with world population of 7.5 billion people) or 48 cubic feet per person per day. Keep in mind that there are many countries in the world, particularly in Asia and Africa, that use very little or no natural gas per person.
And these people want reliable affordable electricity so they can have better lives. Now many of them use wood and dung for fuel on a daily basis. When it gets dark, they are in the dark. They say let there be light!
In the United States natural gas is used to make electricity (36% of the total used), industry (33%), homes (16%), commercial (11%) and transportation (3%).
Energy.gov says “Natural gas is, in many ways, the ideal fossil fuel. It is clean, easy to transport, and convenient to use. Industrial users use almost half of the gas produced in the world.”
In 2019, it is estimated that there is 7,177 trillion cubic feet of proven natural gas reserves in the earth.
Source World Meters
Notice how we keep getting more “proven” natural gas reserves. Even though we continue to use natural gas and oil, the proven reserves keep going up.
I have seen reports that oil fields that the experts thought were empty when revisited decades later had more oil and natural gas. And we are getting better, all the time, at finding it more accurately and easily.
The United States is the number one natural gas producer in the world, followed by Russia and Saudi Arabia.
Source United State Energy Information Agency
We use a tremendous amount of energy. Oil, natural gas, and coal supply 80% of the world’s energy. Changing this fact is not going to be easy, nor fast and it will cost 100’s of trillions of dollars.
