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US LNG Exports
The United States must be able to sell LNG at a competitive price in the European
market. The Trump administration is highlighted in what they have been talking
about in terms of their energy policy, but it was definitely something that the Obama
administration was interested in as well. Crucially, it is not necessarily that the US
wants to supply all of Europe’s gas, rather it wants to offer Europe an alternative. It
wants European countries to think that they do not have to solely rely on Russia.
The problem is still that even with very low domestic US gas prices, even very low,
the extra costs involved in LNG, the liquefaction, the shipping, the reclassification
of the other end, all of that means that LNG is still relatively expensive, supply coming into the European market, certainly in terms of the underlying cost relatively
expensive coming into Europe compared to Russian gas. However, it has had a very
appreciable impact on European gas markets simply by being there as an option. So,
Gazprom has been forced into a lot of changes to its structures and pricing; there is
a lot more kind of flexibility now that you see in Gazprom’s behavior because it
knows that US gas is there as an option.
US–China Relations
The inevitable rise of China is being underpinned by the fact that it is currently the
world’s largest economy based on purchasing power parity (PPP), the workshop of
the world, the world’s largest importer of crude oil, the growing importance of the
petro-yuan, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), and above all the Russian-Chinese
strategic alliance which will lead and shape the new world order in the twenty-first
century.
Were China to be prevented by rising US tariffs from exporting some $800 billion worth of goods annually to the United States, it can sell them somewhere else.
However, for the United States to replace these imports with far more expensive
imports from Japan, South Korea, and the EU could lead to rising costs for US customers, higher domestic inflation, widening the budget deficit, and adding at least
2.35% to the US’s current outstanding debts of $23 trillion. Still, the trade war is not
principally about oil or China’s trade surplus and alleged Chinese malpractices. It is
about the petro-yuan undermining the supremacy of the petrodollar and by extension the US financial system, Taiwan, refusal by China to comply with US sanctions
against Iran and Venezuela, China’s overwhelming dominance in the Asia-Pacific
region, and its sovereignty claim over 90% of the South China Sea, the new order in
the twenty-first century and above all fear of the US losing its unipolar status.
The US has achieved significant progress in being the number one crude oil producer thanks to shale oil and the same will happen in gas. However, this is not that
position as strong as the position of Russia and Saudi Arabia. Because we do not
know exactly how much reserves there are in shale. It is also produced mostly by
US–China Relations
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