Mỹ chạy đua bán khí đốt tự nhiên cho các nước châu Á bằng lối tắt giá trị qua Mexico

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As soon as next year, the United States’ fossil fuel industry (ngành nhiên liệu hóa thạch) will gain its first foothold on a valuable shortcut to sell natural gas to Asia. The shortcut goes straight through Mexico.

The terminal is symbolic of an enormous shift underway in the gas trade, one that will influence fossil-fuel use worldwide for decades and have consequences in the fight against climate change.

The American fracking boom has transformed the United States into the world’s largest gas producer and exporter (nhà sản xuất và xuất khẩu khí đốt). At the same time, the rest of the world has begun using ever more gas — in power plants, factories and homes — partly to move away from dirtier fuels like coal (than). Demand (nhu cầu) is particularly growing in China, India and fast-industrializing Southeast Asian countries.

In Mexico, the action is centered for now on a gas terminal, Energía Costa Azul, that was originally designed to send gas in the other direction: For more than a decade it has unloaded gas (khí nạp) from Asian tankers and piped it to California and Arizona to be burned to produce electricity.

Besides being closer to Texan gas fields than California, Mexico’s less stringent environmental rules (quy định nghiêm ngặt về môi trườngquy định nghiêm ngặt về môi trường) and cheaper construction costs are some of the reasons these export terminals are being proposed there rather than the U.S. West Coast. But analysts say that these terminals are essentially American ones: They are mostly owned, operated and supplied by U.S. gas companies.

The ripple effects (hiệu ứng gợn) on the global gas market created by President Biden’s directive are still shaking out, analysts said, and it remains unclear how long the pause will remain in effect. The question of who will win the U.S. presidential election in November also looms over the market.

But in an industry that often sells its product through long-term contracts (hợp đồng dài hạn) decades in advance, investors are likely to look toward U.S. competitors in the gas market as well as current operators in the United States and Mexico with room for growth.

source: nytimes,