The coming American industrial renaissance
Friday, April 27, 2012 at 12:02AM 
WSJ piece on Dow Chemical building . . .
. . . a multi-billion-dollar plant to convert natural gas into the building blocks of plastic in this coastal city [Freeport TX, just south of Houston], becoming thelatest chemical maker to capitalize on abundant gas supplies that are helping spur a renaissance in U.S. manufacturing.
This is all wonderful news, but it doesn't stop up from still exporting a significant portion of our now severely glutted natural gas supplies to improve our trade deficit and empower our extractive industry further to take its revolutionary fracking techniques global.
Natural-gas futures closed Wednesday at $1.95 per million British thermal units, down 55% from a year ago and the lowest price in 10 years.
This is killing futher exploration and production in the U.S.
Why do we allow this glut to remain bottled up in the U.S.? This crazy-ass notion of "energy independence."
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Reader Comments (2)
I suspect that if you scratch most "energy independence" fans, they wouldn't have a problem with export in normal times. Energy independence in my experience is maintaining the capability of pulling up the drawbridge and making it if the world goes completely crazy. It's a "prepper" manifestation. I would bet that if you went project by project on what was keeping export infrastructure from being built out you'd find two major opponents time and again, NIMBY/BANANA types and environmentalists.
The Dow project (as well as those of the other petrochem producers who are doing the same) could be major game-changing ones. If shale gas production continues in the US at this rate, this may create a new polymer production renaissance in the US - which in turn means more jobs and development. Expect companies worlwide to follow suit - but unless they start to do it in the US, they could end up years behind.