I don't agree with your qualifications. It was far more than just the opinions of government officials. From that time Natural Gas imports quadrupled before they started coming down.
U.S. Natural Gas Imports
https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/hist/n9100us2m.htm
Major players in the industry spent billions of dollars building LNG import facilities and was still building them as late as 2008.
(Although that Freeport LNG had been in the works for years. They loaded exactly one ship to commission it. It never operated commercially past that point until they built the export unit to liquefy the Nat Gas from inland.)
You might not have been around back then, but it was the federal government causing those shortages.
Carter and the Congressional Dems decided to freeze the price of natural gas sent into interstate markets. This predictably caused new drilling in the fields dedicated to that market to dry up and production declined immensely.
I was there working and we had no incentives to produce more gas in those fields. I recall the max was maybe 59 cents per mcf, with some only 19 cents per mcf, compared to a couple of dollars per mcf for intrastate. Us Texans were forced to pay several times as much for natural gas we produced and used compared to what we produced that went elsewhere.
That is one reason the bumper stickers driving around Texas back then was "Let the bastards freeze in the dark"
It was a disaster policy that caused those imports.
This country never ran out of natural gas other than due to governmental interference.