by Rod D. Martin
May 24, 2015

It was very recently unthinkable that the United States, strongly dependent on foreign energy sources, would ever not only meet its own demand in what was predicted to be a post-peak oil world, but indeed export astonishing quantities of liquified natural gas. Welcome to the future.

In an article in The Telegraph, International Business Editor Ambrose Evans-Pritchard writes about large-scale changes coming to LNG markets by way of massive U.S. exports.

The United States is poised to flood world markets with once-unthinkable quantities of liquefied natural gas as soon as this year, profoundly changing the geo-politics of global energy and posing a major threat to Russian gas dominance in Europe. 

“We anticipate becoming big players, and I think we’ll have a big impact,” said the Ernest Moniz, the US Energy Secretary. “We’re going to influence the whole global LNG market.”

LNG terminals are under construction and shipments are imminent.

Mr Moniz said the surge in US output from shale fracking has already transformed the global market. “We would have been importing a lot of LNG by now. Those cargoes would have gone elsewhere and have in fact had a significant impact in the European market,” he said. 

Gas frackers assembled at the world’s “energy Davos” in Houston said exports could ultimately be much higher, potentially overtaking Russia as the world’s biggest supplier of natural gas of all kinds.

Moreover, the U.S. is poised to displace major LNG exporters within the next four and a half years.

“Certainly in this decade, there’s a good chance that we will be LNG exporters on the scale of Qatar, which is today’s largest LNG exporter,” he said, speaking on the margins of the IHS CERAWeek energy summit in Texas.

For years I have been telling you that energy scarcity was a myth, that technology would trump it in the same way that it has since the scaremongers began preaching the end of oil barely a decade after Drake drilled his original Titusville well.

Rarely does someone get proven so fantastically correct so quickly. But this is only the beginning. And it needs to be: a billion people around the world live without electricity. I spoke to a doctor recently who told me about people dying of lung cancer in East Africa, people whose lungs look like those of chain smokers who’ve never touched tobacco: they depend on kerosene lamps for light in their apartments.

Energy isn’t a surplus item we can do without. Every single blessing of the modern world depends on it. And there remains a world full of people doing completely without, and untold blessings we haven’t invented yet at home.

The energy revolution isn’t just a funny ha-ha on the left, though it is that. It’s the key to the elimination of poverty  and want. The fact that they don’t understand that is an indictment against their worldviews, their shortsightedness, and their supposedly boundless “compassion.”

Read the full Telegraph article here.