Maggie's Farm

The LNG business has been around a very long time, and your description is not an accurate one. These projects cost into the billions of dollars and rely on long-term contracts to make them work. What makes the business highly profitable are the cargoes that are sold by over-performing plants with capacity to spare after fulfilling their contracts. These are called 'excess cargoes' and they are subject to furious arbitrage on the world spot market. When a country is getting desperate for gas - almost always for power generation - then they will pay through the nose. To illustrate, when gas on a long-term contract might be locked in at, say $4 per million standard cubic feet (mmscf), an excess cargo of the very same gas might fetch up to $40 on the spot market. So emergencies like the Nordstream sabotage have resulted in some pretty juicy cargoes, I would bet. But the ability to match demand is going to be a struggle. They don't build LNG plants on speculation.

Well.... There's not much point in arguing, so I won't. I've been drilling gas wells for the LNG business since about 1990, so.... I have managed to pick up a little bit about the business model during that time.

If you think there's a vast Left-wing Progressive government conspiracy to prevent Americans from having gas stoves/gas heat so that private Oil and Gas companies can then make enormous profits in LNG speculation, then I invite you to back it up with numbers, after you explain why you think Leftists love Oil and Gas companies so much.

My numbers say that domestic consumption continues to increase, across the petrochemical product spectrum, including natural gas.

The US blew up the Nordstream lines to f*ck with the Russians at the direct expense of our allies, and the consequence has presented an opportunity for LNG plants across the globe to supply excess cargoes at a premium to bail out Europe this winter.

Geez... To fully capture the simplistic moral high ground, we should also eschew importing any hydrocarbons whatsoever. Otherwise we're just being fat American hypocrites - right?

And that would include trading the hydrocarbons that we have, in surplus, in exchange for foreign-sourced hydrocarbons that we need for refining fuels, but do not produce in the USA, because they aren't here in sufficient quantity. Because in principle, markets don't work and need our help or something.

It is the opposite of a simplistic business. People that forecast oil & gas markets for a living, still struggle to do it with any precision. Hydrocarbons are the foundation and principle driver of the world economy.

I would recommend reading The Prize by Daniel Yergin to get an idea of the basic complexities of the oil & gas business, and then start understanding how much of our GDP has to do with petroleum products - especially those products that are derived from hydrocarbons as their principle ingredient, before refining, adding value, and exporting them. Plastics, for example.

Nope, I'm all through with you, 'Anon'. I've made a couple of good-faith attempts to share my experience, to maybe contribute some insight, and you've responded with short-form know-nothing trollery, insisting that the world is a highly simplified set of beliefs that shouldn't be stirred with any stinkin' complexities like facts. Good luck, maybe for you it is - maybe it's cloudy today, and you can go outside and shake your fist at the clouds, and yell at them until they go away.

Here's a small example of what I am driving at: Venezuela has more oil reserves than any other nation, including Saudi Arabia. Most of their crude is called 'black oil'. It's extremely thick and heavy. It's so thick & heavy, that they have to import condensate - a very light, volatile type of crude oil product - in order to even refine their own heavy crude. Without it, as a nation they would be virtually unable to refine jet fuel, gasoline, kerosene, diesel, and industrial solvents. All they would have is plenty of asphalt and bunker fuel, for large ships.

The US has crudes that are quite a bit lighter, generally speaking. Our crudes are mostly good for diesel-type fuels - diesel, home heating oil, kerosene, jet fuel. Gasoline is actually a by-product, most of our refining capacity is geared toward diesel and gasoline is a consequence - which is why the US has a dis-proportionally large gasoline fleet, compared to Europe.

But we import quite a lot of gas from Mexico and Canada. Not just natural gas, but other gas fractions as well. In fact the state of Michigan pretty much relies on propane imports from Canada to get through the winter. Why? Because the US doesn't produce enough propane. Get it? Complex markets require complex trade mechanisms to satisfy the consumer and industrial demand. It's not a simple story of shutting down borders and hunkering down. If you shut down your exports, you will be shutting down your imports too, because those foreign markets are relying on your trade for their domestic requirements.

What NG companies are working in concert with the US Government, and who in the US government is in charge of this effort? Not just name-calling, provide some facts to hang it on and some citations that make it more than just conjecture..