"The country must produce record levels of gas to keep pace with surging LNG exports, or the mismatch in supply and demand could spike domestic energy prices."
"As the Trump administration promotes U.S. natural gas exports, federal analysts warn that shipping massive volumes abroad could raise costs for consumers at home.
The fracking revolution unleashed abundant natural gas in the early 2010s, lowering costs for heating and enabling gas-fired power production to unseat coal as the top electricity source in the United States.
Now, though, homes and power plants compete with a new and growing source of gas consumption: liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals, gargantuan facilities that compress and ship gas to buyers overseas. Eight terminals currently export gas from U.S. shores, sucking up more than all 74 million households on the domestic gas network do. Counting those terminals and pipelines that carry the fossil fuel to Canada and Mexico, the U.S. exports more than 20% of its gas production.
LNG facilities generate immense revenue for the companies that build and supply them, but they come with considerable environmental and climate impacts. The export infrastructure justifies even more fossil-fuel extraction at a time of record U.S. production, and the energy-intensive process required to liquefy, ship, and regasify the fuel releases far more carbon than simply burning gas. Depending on how much of the gas leaks along the way, the fuel can be as bad as coal in terms of greenhouse gas emissions."
