“Pricing out American consumers?” Wow. That’s a statement that demands a reality check. Let’s have a look.
The most expensive natural gas in the United States usually shows up at the PG&E hub in Northern California—a full dollar or so above most other regions. And Northern California, let’s recall, isn’t exactly hooked up to any of the major shale basins. Not easily, anyway. Nor is it feeding the massive LNG export terminals that supposedly “siphon off” domestic supply. Those terminals sit closer to the big shale plays, and the hubs near them are among the cheapest in the nation.
Even that “expensive” PG&E gas? Still about three times cheaper than the median European price. So if Northern Californians are being “priced out,” what should Europeans say—thank you, sir, may I have another?
And let’s not forget where much of the feedstock for these new LNG projects comes from. A lot of it is flared gas—the stuff burned off at shale oil sites because there’s no infrastructure to use it. These operators aren’t choking supply; they’re desperate for monetization. If California wanted to lay a pipeline to capture that gas, the shale drillers would probably hold the ribbon-cutting ceremony themselves.As for LNG being the great price villain—hardly. Its influence will be anemic at best. The real price driver, the true heavyweight in this game, is not LNG but renewable fragility. When the wind dies or the sun takes the day off, gas is called to save the grid—again and again. That’s when prices surge. Not because of imaginary villains in export terminals, but because of the physics of intermittency and the economics of fantasy.
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Natural-Gas/The-LNG-Boom-Thats-Pricing-Out-American-Consumers.html