Several firms want to construct facilities in the region to liquefy gas and export it a dramatic reversal from a few years ago, when the need was thought to be for import terminals.America's big pipeline network creates a relatively liquid and fungible national market for gas, so customers far from any shale beds are still able to take advantage of low gas and chemicals prices.
Even allowing for another $6 or so to liquefy the gas and transport it to Asia (and far less from Canada's west coast), the price would still be a lot lower than the $15-18 per MBTU that LNG currently fetches in Japer.
Shell plans $30 billion of investments in Australia over the next five years.For Prelude, another of its Western Australian projects, Shell is building a huge floating plant to liquefy gas from under the seabed.
National energy firms rarely pay for the vast infrastructure needed to liquefy gas, ship it in freeze tanks and regasify it close to consumers.
It is also the site for a natural-gas plant that is expected to liquefy 15m tonnes a year from the onshore Gorgon fields.
Mr Buzek [an engineer and former prime minister who is now a member of the European Parliament] pins his hopes on techniques to liquefy or gasify coal, but they are not yet developed".A 260MW coal-gasification combined power plant has been in operation at Tampa Electric Company's Polk Power Station since 1996.
So until now, getting the gas to market has involved cooling it enough to liquefy it, shipping it in special tankers, and converting it back to gaseous form at the destination which is expensive and capital-intensive.
He also predicts that Petrobras will end up flaring much of the gas that rushes out with the oil, rather than spending lots of money to liquefy it to generate electricity.Mr Gabrielli insists that the investment in the sub-sea field can pay its way even if the oil price averages no more than its current level of around $45.
Its trick when doing this is to liquefy the sand by repeatedly contracting and expanding its body.
In the United States the government has recently approved the construction of four terminals to liquefy gas and ship it west via the Panama Canal.One of those, Dominion Energy's Cove Point, near Washington, DC, built as an LNG import terminal in the 1970s, had been mothballed for much of the following three decades.
It makes no economic sense: beyond 3,000km, it is cheaper to liquefy and ship natural gas than pipe it.
