2
Study supports exporting U.S. natural gas
Men with Cabot Oil and Gas work on a natural gas valve at a hydraulic fracturing site on Jan. 18, 2012 in South Montrose, Penn. As the Department of Energy considers several requests for export licenses, a study says exporting our glut of natural gas would benefit the economy.
To view this content, Javascript must be enabled and Adobe Flash Player must be installed.
A new report conducted for the Obama administration's Energy Department arrives at a not-surprising conclusion: If you have a low-cost item, mark it up and sell lots abroad -- whether it's cotton, almonds or natural gas -- it's a net gain to the economy.
The company Cheniere Energy has been making the argument for years. It operates natural gas export terminals. CEO Charif Souki says the U.S. has a glut of natural gas, on the order of several billion cubic feet, or BCF.
"We don't know what to do with this gas," Souki says. "So what are we going to do with it? Not sell it. That's great. Every BCF is 50,000 jobs. Every bcf is $3 or $4 billion a year."
The Energy Department will use the report as it decides whether to allow new exports of natural gas.
But opponents have their math, too. The U.S. petrochemical industry buys cheap gas as a raw material. And for now, it's outcompeting much of the world.
Export too much, and prices could go up, the industry argues.
"The longer we can stay with affordable, predictable prices that are good for producers and consumers, the better off our country will be," says Seth Roberts of Dow Chemical.
Also against exports: protectionists, critics of the natural-gas drilling process known as fracking, and those who argue exports undermine energy security.
In the end, the market put on the brakes. It's unclear how long U.S. prices will stay low vis-à-vis the rest of the world, or how much long-term global demand is really out there.
"I think there is going to be a limit to how many potential exporters can really line up the financing that they need to deliver," says Michael Levi of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Either way, the country now has a political fight over exporting energy -- one it hasn't had for 50 years. And natural gas may be the warm-up act: U.S. production of certain types of crude oil is poised to outrun domestic refining capacity. The oil export debate could arrive as early as next spring.
I know no 0ne that wants this policy so it is a matter of simply voting corporate Third Way Democrats out of office and vote for real fiscal progressives to turn these practices around. We made the mistake of thinking Clinton was a progressive when he was a Reagan corporate liberal who works for corporations and wealth.....not the Kennedy liberal that worked for people and then media has worked hard since not to explain the difference to the American public. It is so odd to live at a time when America goes from a strong Democracy to a Kleptocracy by simply voting Third Way corporate democrats into office.
The democratic base now understands this and we will clean out those Third Way leaders in the party. All these policies are easy to reverse. We do want to say that the conversation needs to start on the nationalization of these natural gas fields as a way to pay down the debt and rebuild our domestic infrastructure. Between that and the recovery of trillions in corporate fraud across all business sectors, we will reverse wealth inequity and downsize corporations to manageable and accountable entities!
It bothers me that we are in such a rush to use up every last bit of natural resources in our anxiety to make billions more for corporations (I don't buy for a second the billionaires care about creating long lasting jobs for workers). Once natural resources are gone, they are gone forever. The billionaires can fly to the moon but that leaves the rest of us no where. Whatever happened to managing our resources instead of being in a reckless run to destroy the environment and use up every last bit of our resources? We are not learning anything from experience. When did we decide the future wasn't worth planning for?
