NRO contributor Robert Bryce writes:

Back on November 3, fresh from a mid-term shellacking that added 63 new Republicans to the House of Representatives, President Obama uttered two words that have been missing from nearly every energy-related discussion he’s had since he began running for president: “natural gas.”
His specific words–”we’ve got terrific natural gas resources in this country”–should not be noteworthy. But throughout his years as an elected official, Obama has been almost completely silent about natural gas’s critical role in the U.S. energy mix.
He has frequently promoted ethanol, solar, and wind power, and has even said nice things about coal. Heck, he’s even said nuclear power is necessary–a rare stance among Democrats. But when it comes to natural gas, Obama has been nearly mute.
It’s time for the president to speak up. Over the past four years or so, the drilling industry has perfected the technologies needed to unlock galaxies of methane from shale beds.
The result: lower prices for consumers as U.S. natural-gas production has reached its highest level since the early 1970s. This revolution in natural-gas production has fundamentally changed the U.S. energy picture.
The latest estimates indicate that America may be sitting atop the natural-gas equivalent of more than 350 billion barrels of oil–roughly as much as the proved oil reserves of Saudi Arabia and Venezuela combined.
Obama should be welcoming low natural-gas prices, particularly given the ongoing recession. Between 2005 and 2008, the consensus in the U.S. energy business was that America would need to import increasing amounts of natural gas, and that prices were surely headed higher.
During that same four-year period, U.S. natural-gas prices averaged nearly $7 per million Btu. But the shale gas revolution has changed all that.
Thanks to surging production, natural-gas prices during the first ten months of 2010 averaged about $4.25 per million Btu.
That price reduction of about $3 per million Btu is now saving U.S. consumers about $65 billion per year or about $180 million per day. Those energy savings are likely to continue for several years.

The rest here.