What are the key challenges for the natural gas industry, both from and operational and services side perspectives?
Hannan: Operators face losing a large portion of their highly skilled management and field workforce to retirement over the next decade. They need to find ways to capture and manage the intellectual property that resides in the minds of these key people and to attract and train new personnel to replace them. LDCs must optimize their systems to allow them to meet increasing demand for natural gas with limited capital budgets. Managing complex automation projects successfully is a key challenge, but doing more with less seems to be the mantra for our economy, and the gas industry is no exception. Automation is not always done in the right way or for the right reasons. Companies that do it well will have a significant competitive advantage. One possible challenge for the next generation is keeping our pipes as a premier source of energy delivery for our economy. There is a lot of R&D going into many different sources of energy now, and a technological breakthrough in how energy is created
