Mr. Obama, could this be your LNG term?

Mr. Obama – you are in your second term now. There is an entrepreneurial spirit under the Natural Gas hood. Being friends with them will help America a lot.

Congratulations Mr. Obama,

Now that the celebrations are over – back to work. There is one item that is dear to us Natural Gas fans.

I don’t want to bore you with the old arguments that Natural Gas is clean and that it’s abundant and the usual yadda yadda. You have heard them thousands of times. Way more important are the consequences of what has been happening in the US for the last decade.

It’s easy to forget that today’s ever-growing shale gas economy has been derided as a joke by almost anyone just a couple of years ago. I remember that I tried to persuade my peers in Europe of the benefits of shale for our continent since 2007. With very limited success I must confess.

Despite all the naysayers, the entrepreneurs soldiered on. Shale has now taken a life of its own and we should not forget the causes that made this little miracle happen. In his most important book – “The Ultimate Resource II” – Julian Lincoln Simon purports that resource scarcity leads to pressures. Those pressures, if unmediated, will drive the entrepreneurs among us to try making money by being inventive and taking risks. Many will fail, but those who ultimately prevail will leave humanity better off than if the original scarcity had never existed all along.

This is what happened to Natural Gas and indeed energy through shale. High energy prices made this happen and the real fun has just about started. Because more Natural Gas for power production, households, and industry is just the beginning. LNG technology makes shale a much more interesting proposition as through this very mature technology, LNG may finally take its rightful place as THE fuel of the world replacing diesel.

LNG is a decades-old technology – no rocket science in there. Some of the leading LNG technology companies are American. They are working on the next generation of LNG equipment right now.

Shale gas together with LNG will make not only the United States but indeed the world a better place. The prospect of America becoming an energy-exporting nation is imminent. LNG goes to places where the shale gas revolution has not bitten yet. Energy-intensive industries relocate to the US to take advantage of lower natural gas prices there creating lots of jobs in the process. The old world order is being put on its head.

All this came about through free entrepreneurs and creative spirits and not through government programs. Make the US a country of entrepreneurs again. I grew up in Austria, less than 3 miles from the Iron Curtain, and still remember Warsaw Pact border guards breathing down my neck. When the curtain fell I saw with my own eyes what an entrepreneur-hostile environment does to national economies and their populations.

America was always the land of infinite opportunity for my generation and we loved it for that. 4 years ago you said: “Yes, we can”. The American people endorsed you in the recent election. Give it back to them by letting them be entrepreneurs in energy.