Natural gas revolution reversing LNG tanker trade
By Steven Mufson, WashPost, Published: December 7
COVE POINT, Md. — A vast dock stands a mile offshore here, its concrete legs planted in the water and its steel tentacles poised to suck natural gas in a liquid state from special refrigerated tankers up to a thousand feet long.
But on a recent clear fall afternoon, there wasn’t a tanker in sight. Inside a control room, operator Ron Keraga watched computer monitors that did not blink. The only flurry came from the sea gulls, which perched on the railings outside and then left a white trail behind them.
“Like any job, there’s going to be some downtime,” Keraga said.
In this case, a lot of downtime. Dominion Resources’ Cove Point terminal, originally designed in the 1970s, can import liquefied natural gas — or LNG — from up to 220 tankers a year. But this year only one tanker has unloaded here, back in May.
That’s because the international trade in natural gas — and the rest of the energy business — has been turned upside down. It’s as startling as it would be if rivers decided to run upstream.
(More here.)
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1 Comments:
Hmmm ... while Senator Wyden expresses some caution, the reaction from Senator Lisa Murkowski (R., Alaska), the top Republican on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee offers a different slant - "It's clear from the study that exporting LNG would be beneficial to the US economy, and the greater the level of exports, the greater the benefit."
Rep. Ed Markey (D., Mass.), a critic of both fracking and gas exports, said large-scale exports would lead to a "massive wealth transfer from working Americans to oil and gas companies."
The NERA report found that exports would benefit gas producers while slightly cutting into the real wages of workers, who could see higher prices for electricity and manufactured goods. "Impacts won't be positive for all groups in the economy," the report found.
Dow Chemical management is expressing
that the report also fails to consider the "tremendous competitive advantage" that cheap natural gas prices could offer to the US if held for domestic use.
"The report issued by the DOE on liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports is flawed, misleading, and based on outdated, inaccurate and incomplete economic data," said Andrew N. Liveris, Dow’s CEO.
"Manufacturing is the largest user of natural gas in the US, and creates more jobs and more value to the US economy from natural gas than any other sector," he continued.
"The value of every unit of energy used by the manufacturing sector is multiplied by as many as 20 times from the production of thousands of high value products though the value chain. Compare this to the 1-time value created by exporting energy as liquefied natural gas."
"Instead, the report offers the baffling conclusion that the US would be better off using its domestic natural gas advantage to fuel growth and jobs in other regions versus strengthening the US economy through manufacturing and benefiting consumers with lower energy costs."
Considering that Dow is one of the largest consumers of US natural gas and is investing heavily to build new processing facilities on the Gulf Coast, the comments are not a surprise ... yet, the reports conclusion that exports could raise the domestic price of natural gas by between 22 cents and $1.11 per thousand cubic feet within five years tells us that Americans consumers will be paying more and seeing producers gain.
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