By RUSSELL GOLD
Royal Dutch Shell PLC plans to increase natural-gas production in North America, said Marvin E. Odum, head of the company's U.S. unit.

Though gas prices are low now, Shell believes long-term prices will recover, justifying the company's interest, Mr. Odum said.

He said the growth in gas production would come from the company's deep-water discoveries in the Gulf of Mexico as well as from giant shale formations in western Canada, the Rockies and the Gulf Coast.

Shell's natural-gas production in the U.S. fell to 1.05 billion cubic feet a day last year, down 9.5% from two years earlier, according to company filings. Its Canadian production has been flat. Still, North American natural gas currently accounts for about 7.8% of Shell's global oil and gas production.

North American gas ouput "could be much more than what we're producing now," Mr. Odum said in an interview Monday. He declined to say how much he expected it to grow, however.

Shell moved quickly to embrace the unconventional gas discoveries made by smaller, independent producers earlier this decade. In 2007, it joined with Calgary-based EnCana Corp. to develop acreage in Louisiana's Haynesville shale. Shell last year paid $5.87 billion to acquire Duvernay Oil Corp., a company that had amassed 450,000 acres in western Alberta and British Columbia that appear promising for gas production.

Shell has what Mr. Odum called "a very significant land position" in parts of North America where large amounts of natural gas is trapped in dense rocks such as shale.