North American natural gas companies, in the midst of tapping vast new reserves from underground shale rock, are looking to energy-hungry Asia as the main future market for the cleanest burning fossil fuel.
But even as a study commissioned by the U.S. government and published recently concluded that shipping some of the abundant U.S. shale gas overseas would benefit the economy far more than keeping it at home, critics raised objections to exports.
Japan and other Asian importers buy liquefied natural gas (LNG), super-cooled for transport in special tankers by sea, mainly from Australia and the Middle East. They have to pay four or five times as much for their supplies as buyers of gas in the United States, where shale production has surged and prices have plummeted in recent years.