This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, February 12th, 2024.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Along a number of dimensions, it makes little sense for the Biden administration to pause exports of liquefied natural gas.

Cato's Travis Fisher explains why.

Where does the U.S. stand in terms of liquefied natural gas production and how useful is it?

So it's incredibly useful.

We have become a large producer, so it's mostly the shale gas boom.

This is extracting natural gas from shale rock formations,

and usually people call that fracking.

It's a combination of horizontal drilling and the hydraulic fracturing process.

Turns out we've been able to do a ridiculous amount of gas production. So much so that we go from, I't know about 10 years ago the conversation was around

LNG imports so that we need to get more gas from other countries. We've completely

reversed that and now we're producing so much that we're exporting and we're not just exporting we just became in

2023 the largest LNG exporter globally so we went from importing it about 10 years ago to over the

course of you know 2015 was the first year we started really exporting it. Now we're

already the global leader so it's been it's been a big deal.

Our listeners may recall that there was such a boom in this production.

demand for the specific type of sand that was necessary to make this process easier.

There was a housing crisis that struck North Dakota as people were scurrying up there to try to take advantage of it and the very high

salaries that were being offered. And the product of that has been that the U.S. is now the number one, if not producer but exporter of liquefied natural gas.

That's right and it coincides with, I mean you can apply the same technology to produce oil from shale so we've done that too and a lot of the play in the

Dakotas has been oil. Oftentimes you get both. So we've actually become the world's largest producer

...