http://www.oilandgasreporter.com/stories/030204/ind_20040302012.shtml

HOUSTON- With remarkably little public debate in Congress or in the current political campaigns, the United States is drifting toward a future where up to 25 percent of its natural gas supplies will come from foreign sources.

Long blessed with an abundant and inexpensive supply of natural gas for heating, industry and electrical power generation, consumers and the gas industry have watched as demand overtook supply in the past three years and prices have moved inexorably upward.

With no reversal in sight, producers are turning to liquefied natural gas, or LNG, which would be imported from the Middle East, Asia and Africa.

It will require a gargantuan capital investment for large receiving ports along the U.S. coast, including the Gulf of Mexico. The energy industry, environmentalists and neighbors to those proposed ports are expected to clash.

"A tsunami of LNG tankers is headed toward U.S. ports," Hillard Huntington, director of the Energy Modeling Forum at Stanford University, told a liquefied natural gas conference in Houston last month.

.......

Texas will be a major linchpin in the new LNG industry. Irving-based Exxon Mobil Corp., the world's largest energy producer, has announced a planned investment of $12 billion to $15 billion for an LNG conversion facility in the Middle Eastern kingdom of Qatar. That LNG would be received at two terminals Exxon Mobil has proposed for the Texas Gulf Coast, at Ingleside in San Patricio County, and at Sabine Pass at the Louisiana border.

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"We're at the same point with LNG that the world was in the late 1950s with crude oil," Sweetnam said.

Of course, since the 1950s the United States has switched from having a net surplus of crude oil to being the world's largest importer of crude, with a host of political and geostrategic implications.

"Energy independence" has been a mantra for politicians for three decades - ever since OPEC used its embargo power in 1973-74 to withhold crude oil from the U.S. market. But a political consensus has yet to develop.

Az usa nagyjábol ott tart,ahol tartott az olajjal az 50'-es,60'-as években.Önellátó,de közeledett az a pont amikor egyre inkább külföldi forrásokra támaszkodik.

Gyakorlatilag marada a szén és az atom mint amerikai energiaforrás,a magasabb élőmunkaköltségekkel és a szén esetében a durva közvetlen táj(salak) és durvább területi(savas eső),iletve glob. környezeti károkkal...

Na,kezdenek felébredni a fijuk...:-)