Despite the ongoing propoganda machine’s push for a bailout plan to ‘liberate Europe from Gazprom’s claws’, The FT reports that the head of Cheniere Energy, which is due to become the US’s first new natural gas exporter next year, said the ability of US energy to save Europe from its dependence on Russian supplies had been overstated. Simply put, as Putin knows all too well (but Obama and his merry men in the mainstream media seem destined to perpetuate), Cheniere’s CEO blasts “It’s flattering to be talked about like this, but it’s all nonsense. It’s so much nonsense that I can’t believe anybody really believes it.”
Charif Souki, Cheniere’s chief executive, said that the idea of his company’s exports alone liberating Europe from Russia’s Gazprom was “nonsense” and that only six to eight of 20-plus proposed rival export projects were “real”.
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The east-west stand-off over Ukraine has sparked a political debate over whether the US should loosen its energy export restrictions so Europeans can buy liquefied natural gas, or LNG, from America’s shale energy boom.
Asked if Cheniere’s terminal could rescue eastern European countries from their dependence on Russia, Mr Souki said: “It’s flattering to be talked about like this, but it’s all nonsense. It’s so much nonsense that I can’t believe anybody really believes it.”
The US is working to increase the number of trade agreements to enable any LNG exports but…
Mr Souki said the only ones he considered to be real were the six to eight that had started a separate process – which he said entailed $100m in costs – of gaining permits from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or Ferc, which assesses environmental and safety standards.
“Until somebody tells me they’re willing to spend $100m, I don’t consider them real,” he said.
And that’s not happening anytime soon in a cash strapped and bureaucratically constrained Europe. Furthermore, prices are likely to rise because not even Obam acan mandate where the free market moves its product…
Mr Souki said he had no control over where his customers would sell that LNG. “I’m pretty sure they will be opportunistic and, if they need it for their home market, they will take it for their own markets and, if they don’t need it, it will go somewhere else.”
Or can he.
via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1ncMovN Tyler Durden