For decades, America depended on the world for energy. Today, it’s becoming a global supplier of oil and natural gas in its own right, as Bloomberg reports.
This year, for the first time ever, the U.S. started turning gas from prolific shale formations into liquefied natural gas and sending it overseas. In 2017, the country may be exporting more of the heating fuel than it imports for the first year since the 1950s.
Refurbished pipelines and terminals will come online next year to help unleash the U.S. shale gas boom into the world. But risks still loom. It remains costly to ship U.S. gas to major consumers in Europe and Asia, and President-elect Donald Trump’s trade priorities could make U.S. LNG more expensive than supplies from other producers around the world.
Just a decade ago, gas supplies from conventional wells were drying up. Major energy companies such as ExxonMobil., BP and Chevron Corp. were planning to spend billions on gas import terminals to offset the decline. The technique known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, changed everything for gas drillers, allowing them to pull the fuel out of layers of shale rock and touching off the U.S. shale revolution.
America’s frackers are pulling 18 billion cubic feet of gas per day from the Marcellus shale formation in the eastern U.S., more than any other domestic shale deposit. But the U.S. pipeline system was designed only to move gas from the Gulf Coast to cities in the Northeast—not the reverse.
In order to get the gas to the Gulf Coast, where export terminals are being built to send the fuel overseas, pipelines are being re-engineered to flow south. Thousands of miles of bidirectional pipelines are slated to be online in 2017.
About 40 shipments of LNG have been exported from Cheniere’s Sabine Pass terminal in south Louisiana, which began operations in February. Most of the cargoes have been delivered to South America and Mexico. Once all five terminals are fully operational, U.S. energy producers would have the capacity to export 10 billion cubic feet of LNG daily, up from about 1 billion in 2016.
