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Health & Fitness

WHO NEEDS PORT AMBROSE?

If the proposed LNG port off Long Beach is really supposed to import liquefied natural gas from overseas, it is completely unnecessary. There are already two offshore LNG ports on the East Coast (both in the vicinity of Boston harbor) and neither one of them has received a single shipment of LNG since 2010. Built at a total cost of around 750 million dollars, these two facilities essentially went out of business shortly after they opened.

 In the last few years, hydraulic fracturing has radically altered the natural gas market in the United States, and imported LNG can no longer compete with domestic supplies of fracked gas. In June, natural gas was selling for $3.83 per Mil BTU’s in the U.S., at the same time LNG was selling for $16.06 in Japan. Any country exporting LNG is going to choose to sell it to countries like Japan that will pay three, or four, or five times as much as American buyers.

 And the current state of the natural gas market isn’t likely to change anytime soon. The federal Energy Information Agency predicts that U.S. shale gas production will continue to expand for decades and that the United States become a net gas exporter by 2016.

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 So if there’s no market for imported LNG, why would anyone want to build Port Ambrose? Stay tuned.

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