“US gas exporters are one of the biggest winners from the war in Iran,” Washington, DC’s Semafor political and economic gossip site pronounced on July 16. Qatar, you see, had been the chief US competitor in liquefied natural gas exports for the past ten years. With Qatar’s oil and gas facilities hit in the war (and the Trump administration’s “aggressively pro-gas” policy), “LNG is now set to become the second-most valuable net export from the US (after civilian aircraft) within five years, capturing at least 30% of the global LNG market,” Semafor enthusiastically reported. And that’s despite US LNG still being “more expensive than many rival suppliers.”
The report’s source was the study issued on July 16 by S&P Global Energy on the status of the U.S. LNG industry. That study is even more breathless about LNG than Semafor’s note conveys, projecting hundreds and thousands of jobs and trillions of dollars to be made in the U.S., with U.S. feedgas demand for LNG exports projected to “double to 36 billion cubic feet per day (bcf/d) in the next five years, 25% higher than previous base case projections” made by S&P Global 18 months ago.
