Let America’s Gas Industry Boom - NYPOST.com:
EXCERPTS:
"In recent years, the nation has seen astonishing technological innovation in the natural-gas sector. Companies have discovered vast, gas-rich shale deposits under US soil. And they’ve developed new, high-tech means of extraction. The estimated reserves of recoverable domestic gas are now over 2.2 trillion cubic feet.
"The expansion in supply has already brought a dramatic drop in natural-gas prices, now at a 10-year low. Other countries, mostly in Asia, are eager to buy some of America’s low-cost gas. So 17 US energy companies have applied to export gas. And two proposals for new gas-export terminals — at Coos Bay and the Port of Astoria, both in Oregon — now await federal approval.
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"The argument against natural-gas exports is also economically backward.A nation prospers through international trade precisely by exporting those goods and services that it can produce at relatively low cost.
"Indeed, the Energy Department report found that gas exports benefit the economy despite higher domestic prices — in part because they also mean a corresponding fall in the prices that Americans pay for other goods and services that we import. That is, lucrative exports allow our nation to import more of those goods and services that can be produced at home only at relatively high costs.
