With the recent ruckus over the Deepwater Horizon oil spill off the Gulf of Mexico, followed by the price for a barrel of crude oil taking a significant dive, it’s easy to understand why an investor would be concerned about the future of any crude oil investments they might have. But if you think that you fall into this category, you can take a deep breath and relax. If you have an oil ETF or some other similar investment, you’ll find that it’s pretty safe to assume that you’ll be well off in the long run, despite how dismal things might look now.

The oil spill and the national response to it will likely play a pretty important role in the price of oil rising in the near future. Why is this, you might ask? Well, the main reason is that it seems that the United States government will be taking some precautions to make sure that similar oil spill disasters don’t happen in the future. Which is something that they definitely should be doing. It’s safe to assume that there will be more stringent regulations on what may and may not go on during deep water oil drilling. This is something that will make it much more complicated and expensive for oil companies to obtain oil. While that will definitely be an inconvenience for them, although a necessary one, it will also affect the country at large. Since oil will be more expensive to obtain, the price of oil will have to increase as well, to keep the oil companies from suffering a loss.

Which brings us back to your ETFs, or any other oil investments that you might have. As a result of the new regulations, your investments are sure to increase in value.

This article was provided by the folks over at CopperETF.org.

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The best alternative to our energy crisis is natural gas.  There are many options out there for cleaner, more renewable sources of energy like wind and solar power.  However, those technologies are decades away from advancing to the point where society and our economy will be able to make regular use of it.  Wind and solar is still not a significant enough source of energy to replace oil, but natural gas is.

Benefits of Natural Gas

There are many advantages to gas that is not present with the other clean energy sources.  First of all, our technologies can be easily and cheaply converted to use natural gas instead of petroleum.  In fact, many vehicles are increasingly becoming natural gas powered.  This is not the case with solar cars.  Solar powered cars are decades away from being viable.  And there is currently no design on the table for wind powered vehicles.

Additionally, natural gas is plentiful.  We currently have nearly 238 trillion cubic feet of proven gas reserves in the United States with another 1.8 quadrillion cubic feet that is estimated to be underneath our feet.  Some experts say we have enough gas to fuel our economy for another 100 years.  That should be enough time to figure something else out.  In the mean time, the gas industry is going to be booming.

The other very important reason for the rise of gas is it will take us off our dependence on foreign oil.  That is a rallying cry for many Americans, to get off our dependence on the constantly unstable Middle East.  Gas is our way out and it will increasing become more in demand as the years go by.

How to Invest in Gas

There are several ways to play the gas market.  One way to make it easy on yourself is to invest in a natural gas ETF.  There are 2 major kinds, commodity funds that do futures trading and ones that just invest in natural gas stocks.  That latter is recommend for a number of reasons.

You can of course invest in individual natural gas companies that do drilling and exploration.  Or you can invest in companies that sell equipment for those activities.  You can also do commodity futures, but that won’t really be a good long term investment strategy because futures contracts have end dates.  I would stay away from any futures related until you really understand the in’s and out’s of this market.

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