“THE BARBARIANS ARE AT THE DOOR” - The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future - page 31

message was dramatically dif erent: not only would imports not rise
in the coming decades, they would fall sharply, with shale making up
the dif erence. h e United States, already facing more global risks that
it could handle, would have one less to worry about. Rarely had the
prognosis regarding a key energy source changed so fast.
Not everyone, though, was welcoming the news. In the Middle East,
the tiny state of Qatar had been building up capacity to produce and
ship natural gas to an import-dependent United States. Now, the owner
of the third-largest gas reserves in the world and by far the biggest
exporter of LNG was let without a critical customer. It quickly turned
to Europe (and later to Asia) to sell its surplus supplies. (h e turn to
Europe may also have been part of a deliberate strategy to undermine
Russia, a major Qatari rival in the global LNG trade.) In 2008, Qatar
sold a bit less than three hundred billion cubic feet of liquei ed natural
gas to the Continent. 27 By 2011, the number had skyrocketed to 1.6
trillion. 28 European purchases from Russia, meanwhile, nudged down.
Only a few years earlier, Russia had plunged Europe into the dark,
sending a clear message that continental policymakers needed to keep
Moscow's wishes in mind. Now the power was shit ing. Europeans
had options, and they would barely hesitate to use them to alter the
relationship.
In the opaque and esoteric world of the global natural gas trade, power
is ot en manifested through price. Stronger countries extract steep prices
for the fuel, and weaker ones pay them. Liquei ed natural gas has long
been sold on multiyear contracts where prices are set on the basis of
formulas that derive the price of natural gas from the price of oil and
related products. In recent years, as the price of oil skyrocketed, that
arrangement was a great deal for producers but a raw one for consumers.
In the United States, which has long been isolated from the world natu-
ral gas market, a barrel of oil cost north of a hundred dollars for much
of 2012, but a shipment of natural gas containing the same amount of
energy ot en sold for less than twenty. Meanwhile buyers in Europe were
paying more than twice the U.S. price for natural gas, and Asian buyers
were paying i ve times that sum or more.
h is was a sign that power still rested with the natural gas produc-
ers. In 2012, though, under pressure from a glut of U.S. natural gas, the