The environmental advocates struggling to stop the Keystone XL pipeline and other fracking projects have been fighting to woo the support of Obama and other government officials. Pretty much everybody has been thinking of this as a domestic environmental and energy issue. It now turns out that it is a lot more complicated and part of a long term government planned international initiative.
U.S. Hopes Boom in Natural Gas Can Curb Putin
The crisis in Crimea is heralding the rise of a new era of American energy diplomacy, as the Obama administration tries to deploy the vast new supply of natural gas in the United States as a weapon to undercut the influence of the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, over Ukraine and Europe.
The administration’s strategy is to move aggressively to deploy the advantages of its new resources to undercut Russian natural gas sales to Ukraine and Europe, weakening such moves by Mr. Putin in future years. Although Russia is still the world’s biggest exporter of natural gas, the United States recently surpassed it to become the world’s largest natural gas producer, largely because of breakthroughs in hydraulic fracturing technology, known as fracking.
The basic dynamics of energy supplies and international politics is of course not new. It all started with the Arab oil boycotts of the 1970s. We have been accustomed to the US being in a defensive position on energy. Americans have been cajoled into approving off shore drilling projects in the name of energy independence. They were presented with the specter of Muslim terrorists holding a gun to their heads. The issue of global warming has added impetus to develop supplies of cleaner energy.
Fracking and other technologies for exploiting hard to access supplies of oil and natural gas have come along in response to the finite nature of the traditional accessible deposits of gas and oil. They have raised numerous environmental concerns such as contamination of water supplies. The appeals for restrictions on such projects have all been couched in terms of environmental concern. It turns out that the political equation is much more complicated than that.
But this time, there is a major difference. As recently as 2007, American natural gas supplies were believed to be dwindling, and the George W. Bush administration was considering importing natural gas from Russia. Since then, fracking, which environmentalists say could contaminate America’s water supplies, has transformed the strategic landscape.
The United States does not yet export its natural gas. But the Energy Department has begun to issue permits to American companies to export natural gas starting in 2015. American companies have submitted 21 applications to build port facilities in the United States to export liquefied natural gas by tanker. The agency has approved six of the applications.
At the helm of the new energy diplomacy effort is Carlos Pascual, a former American ambassador to Ukraine, who leads the State Department’s Bureau of Energy Resources. The 85-person bureau was created in late 2011 by Hillary Rodham Clinton, the secretary of state at the time, for the purpose of channeling the domestic energy boom into a geopolitical tool to advance American interests around the world.
The US government has major plans to become the House of Saud when it comes to natural gas. The initiatives involve more than just plans for gas exports. The facilities for that are not yet online and thus not an immediate influence on foreign policy of the moment. Pascual is claiming credit for emboldening Ukraine to throw off the yoke of Gazprom. They have been working to make European countries less dependent on Russian energy imports by developing alternative sources and increasing the capacity of storage facilities. There is also pressure on European countries to initiate their own fracking projects.
Given that Obama and Kerry are doing their best to present themselves as born again cold warriors in the Ukrainian crisis and that natural gas exports are a key plank of long term foreign policy goals, it seems that the dreams of environmentalists that Obama will block the Keystone pipeline are probably doomed for disappointment.
Update: It has been pointed out in comments that the Keystone project is not intended for the commercial production of natural gas. However, there are other fracking projects under consideration that would be intended to accomplish such production. The point I am trying to make is that the goals of US energy policy are in basic conflict with environmental concerns. That conflict will likely impede efforts to stop Keystone.