“THE BARBARIANS ARE AT THE DOOR” - The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future - page 30

continent from the north, sending temperatures plunging just as
Europeans were losing their heat. 23
For policymakers in Washington, the outlook was grim, but it was
still far bet er than in Brussels. h e United States was deeply engaged
in helping to defuse the crisis, but when it came to physical supplies
of natural gas, North America was isolated. Canada, Mexico, and the
United States collectively produced roughly as much natural gas as
they consumed, trading among themselves but buying lit le natural gas
from overseas. Americans were used to foreign energy crises spreading
quickly to the home front, but those crises had been about oil. Oil was
cheap and easy to ship across long distances, which meant that prob-
lems in one place were quickly felt in others. (If one region ran short
of crude, bidders there could buy it away from others, which spread the
pain.) Natural gas, to Americans' good fortune, was dif erent. Shipping
it from one place to another was expensive, and it required multibillion-
dollar facilities that were built only at er i rm long-term deals to buy
and sell gas were in place. Crisis-stricken Europeans couldn't just buy
fuel in the U.S. market and ship it home to make up for the supplies
that Russia had cut of . h e mechanics of the natural gas trade made
North America an island during crises.
But this fortunate isolation was poised to change soon. In September
2008, the U.S. government published its annual outlook for interna-
tional energy. 24 h e message was the same as it had been for years: the
nation would not be independent much longer. “U.S. gross imports of
LNG [liquei ed natural gas] are expected to grow rapidly,” the authors
warned. In fact, the report claimed, they were set to nearly quadruple:
by 2015 the United States would import nearly a tenth of the natural
gas it consumed. h at, strategists feared, meant the next Eurasian crisis
might not be so benign for the United States. 25 With America becoming
deeply dependent on a global natural gas market, Russian-style black-
mail seemed to be only a short way of .
h en, almost overnight, those fears vanished. h e boom in U.S. shale
gas production quickly led analysts to revise their predictions, and all of
a sudden large-scale LNG imports weren't in the cards. On December
19, 2008, the same forecasters who were recently projecting import
dependence published a preview of their next big study. 26 h e new