“More study needed” is the lame-O excuse.
Reuters reports:
The U.S. Energy Department will not make a decision on future liquefied natural gas exports until it has weighed the potential consequences of sending U.S. gas abroad, Energy Secretary Steven Chu said on Thursday.
Chu said there was concern that exporting the nation’s surplus natural gas could lead to higher prices, but that had to be balanced against the economic benefits of increasing the U.S. exports.
“We’re not going to do anything until we make a determination what the impact would be,” Chu told lawmakers at Senate energy committee hearing on the Obama administration’s budget request…
Gas drillers have warned that constraining exports would limit production by making development unprofitable. Already, some companies have begun to cut back on production because of the current gas glut.
LNG should be exported to Hawaii to produce electricity. The residential electricity rate in HI as of November 2011 was 36.6 cents per kilowatt-hour. This is due to oil being used for making electricity. In terms of energy oil is about 8 times as expensive as natural gas on the wholesale basis. Using LNG for an energy source should cut electricity bills in half.
Why not just let the market dictate how much gas we should export?
There will be a news release coming out in the next few months regarding a huge natural gas and oil find right here in the USA that will dramatically alter the dynamics of the world’s oil and gas markets. Trust me, we will have more gas than we could ever export. As usual, every twenty years they tell us that we will run out of oil and or gas and…it never happens. Here we go again!
If O allows exportation of nat gas someone might actually be employed by that enerprise, and we can’t have that.
If you complicate everything, you never have to make a decision and take responsibility for it. You can just explore endless convoluted possibilities and evade the necessary decision.