“THE BARBARIANS ARE AT THE DOOR” - The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future - page 34

h e central message was clear: the United States needed a “pro-export”
energy policy if it wanted to succeed.
h e push to export LNG has been strong. As of late 2012, more than
a dozen companies had applied for permits that would allow them to
build terminals to freely export the fuel, and most observers anticipated
more. Were all of them to be built, the combined l eet could ship more
than a quarter of current U.S. natural gas consumption abroad. 38 So big
an export push would indeed turn global markets and politics upside
down; it would be equivalent to nearly two-thirds of the world's LNG
trade as of 2011.
But exports are unlikely to materialize at that scale. Most analysts
expect U.S. prices to stabilize at a higher level than what prevailed in
2011 and 2012. Add to this the cost of liquefying and shipping natu-
ral gas—it easily adds i ve dollars or more to the price of a thousand
cubic feet of natural gas by the time it makes its way from the United
States to Asia—and the opportunity to proi t from exports isn't as
massive as it seems. Moreover, when you dump a lot of product on a
market, something predictable happens: prices in the market plum-
met, further eroding (and sometimes eliminating) whatever economic
opportunity originally existed. h is is why, as of 2012, most U.S.
energy analysts were predicting much more modest exports, perhaps
adding up to 10 percent of U.S. supplies (and possibly quite a bit
less) before the present decade is out. Most applications to export
LNG, they concluded, would never turn into real facilities, just as
scores of applications to import LNG years earlier had failed to do.
h e impact on overseas markets and politics wouldn't be negligible—
having alternate suppliers with lower costs would give big importers
such as Japan and Korea a stronger hand in dealing with producers,
just as Europeans have gained in their dealings with Russia—but it
might not be as transformative as many have supposed.
And even this modest impact is not foreordained. By 2012, the
prospect of exports had stirred up widespread controversy, and oppo-
nents of exports held some leverage. Companies had applied for export
permits because the United States, by law, does not allow broad LNG
exports without one. Opponents brought a range of concerns to the
table. Consumer advocates feared higher bills for electricity and home