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By: Oliver Milman
July 24, 2024
To witness how the United States has become the world’s unchallenged oil and gas behemoth is to contemplate the scene from John Allaire’s home, situated on a small spit of coastal land on the fraying, pancake-flat western flank of Louisiana.
Allaire’s looming neighbor, barely a mile east across a ship channel that has been pushed into the Gulf of Mexico, is a hulking liquified natural gas (or LNG) plant, served by leviathan ships shuttling its chilled cargo overseas. Another such terminal lies a few miles to the west, yet another to the north. The theme continues even in Allaire’s seaward vista – alongside a boneyard of old oil rigs, a new floating offshore LNG platform is in the works.
“I’m pretty much surrounded,” said Allaire, a retired oil industry engineer who has a trailer, a couple of friendly dogs, and a patch of marshland and beach in Cameron parish. Yet another gas export plant is planned just a few hundred yards from Allaire’s property, while his existing imposing neighbor, which Allaire compares to Las Vegas due to its incandescent flaring of gas into the night’s sky, is on track to expand to become one of the largest such facilities in the world.
“We don’t really have a Gulf coast in the US,” said Allaire. “We have the east coast, the west coast and the carbon coast. This is simply a sacrifice zone for the oil and gas industry.”
The rise of the US as the world’s oil and gas powerhouse has come at an astonishing pace. Within just the last decade, Congress lifted a ban on exporting crude oil and the US became one of the world’s leading oil exporters, elbowing aside classic petrostates like the UAE and Kuwait. In that timeframe, US exports of gas, frozen to liquid form and shipped, also started in earnest and last year America became the world’s leader.
“To go from zero to billions of barrels is just stunning,” said David Dismukes, an energy expert at Louisiana State University. “It can be hard to comprehend.”
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