Shale Fracking Makes U.S. Natural Gas Superpower. Now What?

Asian demand for natural gas has risen so sharply in recent years that Alaska wants to build a $50 billion pipeline and export terminal to move its stranded supply offshore. Exxon Mobil Corp., BP Plc and ConocoPhillips will deliver plans for such a project to Alaska Governor Sean Parnell by the end of this month. Alaska has the only operating liquid natural gas (LNG) export plant in the United States. It’s an aging facility, capable of processing less than 10 percent of the volume of a new 3 billion cubic-feet-a-day terminal. The state’s hunger for revenues from its conventional gas is part of a larger unsolved question that the U.S. will have to tackle in the next few years: What will the nation do with its newfound abundance of natural gas, mostly from unconventional sources? The question lurks just under the surface of the national energy conversation, which vacillates between exuberance that shale gas exists at all and fear that the method of extracting it -- fracking -- is polluting people's water. The high-pitched debates around fracking largely obscure another player: the rest of the world. It wants less expensive natural gas. More