Alana Goodman of the Washington Free Beacon reports one of the consequences of President Biden’s poor choices in natural gas policy.
President Joe Biden’s pause on liquefied natural gas production is already turning into a major financial windfall for Qatar, even as the Gulf regime undercuts the United States and its allies by funding terrorists and sheltering fugitive Hamas leaders.
Qatar, which is the third largest LNG exporter after the United States and Australia, announced last week that it is expanding its natural gas production by 85 percent. The news came weeks after the Biden administration announced that it would freeze new domestic LNG export permits, a policy that many political observers viewed as a concession to climate activists ahead of the presidential election.
Brenda Shaffer, a senior adviser for energy at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said Qatar’s liquefied natural gas expansion was likely spurred by Biden’s policy announcement, adding that Doha will “benefit financially” from the pause.
“Nature doesn’t allow a vacuum. The United States is the biggest producer of natural gas in the world. To say that it’s going to put a pause or freeze for a few years, obviously [other countries] are going to pick up that market,” she said.
Energy experts told the Washington Free Beacon that Biden’s LNG announcement is already pushing buyers away from the U.S. market and toward adversarial competitors.
“European and Asian buyers are now reconsidering their current commitments with U.S. companies and will take their business elsewhere to ensure security of energy supply,” one former Department of Energy official told the Free Beacon.
“Predictably, weeks after the Biden administration’s de facto sanction on America’s LNG industry, Qatar has swooped in to capture the hundreds of billions of dollars in market share that the White House has left on the table,” the former official said.
