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Permalink Reply by jim weyland on May 10, 2014 at 8:47

cm, 

i spent my entire career on the commercial side of the natural gas business.

and, i quickly learned that its a fools errand to attempt to predict gas prices. a corollary: its my experience that in life that the best lessons learned are the ones you paid the most for.

its worth remembering that many of the folks now busting a gut to build lng liquification/export facilities just a little over a decade ago were are the ones working to build lng regasification/import facilities. note: the new units are usually inside the fence of their idle lng import facilities' sites.

all said, i do firmly believe that the export plants will help to partially, maybe even completely, arbitrage (lessen) the spread between the us/na gas price and the world gas price. 

jim

p.s. imo, one can really get on em down at/out of cocodrie.

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Permalink Reply by Steve P on May 10, 2014 at 17:34

If the Council on Foreign Relations has mostly good things to say about Fracking, then I might have to revise my opinion of that group. 

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Permalink Reply by Keith Mauck (Site Publisher) on May 14, 2014 at 3:30

Here is one article 

AMERICA'S ENERGY EDGE

By Robert D. Blackwill and Meghan L. O'Sullivan

Only five years ago, the world’s supply of oil appeared to be peaking, and as conventional gas production declined in the United States, it seemed that the country would become dependent on costly natural gas imports. But in the years since, those predictions have proved spectacularly wrong. Global energy production has begun to shift away from traditional suppliers in Eurasia and the Middle East, as producers tap unconventional gas and oil resources around the world, from the waters of Australia, Brazil, Africa, and the Mediterranean to the oil sands of Alberta. The greatest revolution, however, has taken place in the United States, where producers have taken advantage of two newly viable technologies to unlock resources once deemed commercially infeasible: horizontal drilling, which allows wells to penetrate bands of shale deep underground, and hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, which uses the injection of high-pressure fluid to release gas and oil from rock formations.

The resulting uptick in energy production has been dramatic. Between 2007 and 2012, U.S. shale gas production rose by over 50 percent each year, and its share of total U.S. gas production jumped from five percent to 39 percent. Terminals once intended to bring foreign liquefied natural gas (LNG) to U.S. consumers are being reconfigured to export U.S. LNG abroad. Between 2007 and 2012, fracking also generated an 18-fold increase in U.S. production of what is known as light tight oil, high-quality petroleum found in shale or sandstone that can be released by fracking. This boom has succeeded in reversing the long decline in U.S. crude oil production, which grew by 50 percent between 2008 and 2013. Thanks to these developments, the United States is now poised to become an energy superpower. Last year, it surpassed Russia as the world’s leading energy producer, and by next year, according to projections by the International Energy Agency, it will overtake Saudi Arabia as the top producer of crude oil.

Much has been written lately about the discovery of new oil and gas deposits around the world, but other countries will not find it easy to replicate the United States’ success. The fracking revolution required more than just favorable geology; it also took financiers with a tolerance for risk, a property-rights regime that let landowners claim underground resources, a network of service providers and delivery infrastructure, and an industry structure characterized by thousands of entrepreneurs rather than a single national oil company. Although many countries possess the right rock, none, with the exception of Canada, boasts an industrial environment as favorable as that of the United States.

The American energy revolution does not just have commercial implications; it also has wide-reaching geopolitical consequences. Global energy trade maps are already being redrawn as U.S. imports continue to decline and exporters find new markets. 

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