Forbes: How Cheniere Energy Got First In Line To Export America's Natural Gas

Cheniere Energy’s Charif Souki intends to turn the U.S. natural gas boom into a new American export. Chemical company CEOs have allied with Washington regulators to hamper his cause. So much for free markets.

If you want to see what the natural gas revolution in America has wrought, there’s no better place than the Sabine Pass liquefied natural gas port in coastal Louisiana. There you can peer into five massive storage tanks, each almost big enough to contain Madison Square Garden. Taken together, they can hold the liquefied equivalent of 17 billion cubic feet of natural gas–a quarter of what the United States uses in a day.

They’re empty.

Built in 2008 by Houston-based Cheniere Energy when it appeared certain that the U.S. would soon run short on natural gas and need imports to make ends meet, they ran headlong into the Great American Gas Boom. Drillers in recent years have unlocked so much gas from tight rock that America now enjoys record gas supplies and prices that are just one-quarter of what buyers in Europe and Asia pay. Projections are that the annual U.S. gas supply could grow a further 25% by 2035.  

Rather than let those tanks rust as relics, though, an army of construction workers is turning an import terminal into an export terminal. By 2016 a processing plant will be ready to ship out 500 million cubic feet of gas a day. In the three years after that Cheniere expects to build five more identical systems. The $12 billion investment should in turn be able to export about 4% of America’s current natural gas output, a remarkable turnaround for Cheniere and for Chief Executive Charif Souki. “It’s a revolutionary thing, absolutely astonishing, that America will be an exporter of hydrocarbons,” he says.  MORE