Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. I'm Manuela Saragossa. Coming up, fancy a bit of

freedom gas. It's what the US government calls American natural gas exports. Having the largest

producer of oil and gas in the world now, the United States, say that its molecules are freedom

molecules inevitably puts a political tinge on our trade

and our production. But some countries are very keen indeed on this so-called freedom gas.

For some countries like Lithuania and Poland, Russian gas is unpalatable politically. So they are

eager to diversify away from Russia, even if it means paying more.

How America has upturned the global energy market coming up here in Business Daily from the BBC.

I'm at home and just lighting the gas hob on my cooker because I'm about to brew my morning coffee.

Now, I can be pretty sure that the gas coming out of my cooker here was probably piped in from Norway or the North Sea.

But if I was living in Germany, I'd probably be brewing this coffee with gas from Russia.

In fact, the US would like more of the gas we use in Europe

to come from them, but more than a third of all gas used in Europe still comes from Russia,

and there's no sign of that decreasing, even as the US has emerged in recent years as the

world's largest natural gas producer. And that transformation of the US into a huge energy producer is thanks to its fracking

or shale revolution.

Fracking technology has allowed the US to extract reserves of oil and gas that were

previously inaccessible, which means the US now has lots of gas to sell to the world.

That prompted the US government's energy department to tout American gas as freedom gas.

Molecules of US freedom to be exported to the world is how the department put it.

So what should we make of that?

Megan O'Sullivan is a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School.

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