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Europe is locking itself in to US LNG

(davekeating.substack.com)
151 points hunglee2 | 2 comments | 16 Sep 25 13:56 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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mytailorisrich ◴[16 Sep 25 14:06 UTC] No.45262444[source]▶
Another level of irony is that this is partly because Europe does not want to develop shale gas for environmental reasons, so it imports US LNG... which is mostly shale gas [1].

The US love Europe's policies...

[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/surging-us-lng-expor...

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seszett ◴[16 Sep 25 14:14 UTC] No.45262534[source]▶
That's not especially ironic though. In doing that Europe avoids the pollution associated with shale gas exploitation. The gas itself isn't different once it is extracted, so it doesn't matter if the imported gas is shale gas or whatever else.

The root problem is needing gas at all, of course.

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1. nradov ◴[16 Sep 25 14:39 UTC] No.45262902[source]▶
If a problem has no solution then it's not really a "problem", it's just a fact to be accepted. Regardless of heat and power generation, natural gas is a crucial feedstock for manufacturing many types of chemicals. There is no conceivable future where we don't need that stuff to maintain a modern industrial civilization.
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2. myrmidon ◴[16 Sep 25 15:52 UTC] No.45263915[source]▶
> Regardless of heat and power generation, natural gas is a crucial feedstock for manufacturing many types of chemicals.

Maybe, but the vast majority of gas use in industry is for heat and power and electricity is a trivial substitute there.

And even the direct use as process input is far from unavoidable, because in a lot of cases this use could be reduced/eliminated or shift to synthetic inputs, which would happen organically if prices shifted long-term anyway.