President Trump’s cabinet has been busy rolling back regulations that will make it far easier to extract and produce fossil fuels. But who will buy them?
Nearly everyone, it turns out, particularly under the threat of tariffs.
At an annual energy-industry conference in Houston, executives spoke openly about how companies from around the world are seeking to buy American liquefied natural gas as a way of placating Mr. Trump’s demands to either balance trade or face punitive measures.
“If you’re a nation who has a trade imbalance with the U.S., they’re all asking themselves, ‘What can we do to try to level the playing field?’” said Meg O’Neill, chief executive of Woodside Energy, Australia’s biggest oil and gas company.
They are cutting deals now, she said, in large part “so their government can say, ‘We’re taking action. We hear you, Mr. President.’” Her characterization was echoed by Ryan Lance, chief executive at ConocoPhillips, one of the largest U.S. oil and gas producers, and other speakers at the conference.
Since President Trump took office, oil and gas companies from nearly every continent have dangled the possibility of investing billions of dollars in the United States.
This month Japanese, Taiwanese and Korean companies revived a $44 billion idea — long considered all but financially impossible — to build pipelines and a giant terminal in Alaska that would export natural gas to Asia. Ukraine, eager to preserve its weapons supply from Washington, has signaled it will buy more American gas. South Africa, its aid frozen by Mr. Trump, is trying to cut a deal to expand U.S. companies’ drilling rights in its waters.
Whether all this will translate into firm deals is not yet clear. But the potential deals would lock in decades of investment in fossil fuels at a time when the global energy transition to cleaner energy sources is faltering. The burning of fossil fuels is the main contributor to greenhouse gas emissions that are dangerously warming the planet.
South Africa, which had its U.S. aid frozen by an executive order that accused it of discriminating against its white citizens, is trying to negotiate a new trade deal with Washington. In that deal, the United States would get more access to gas exploration in the region, and South Africa would buy more of its gas from America, according to a government spokesman.
Ukraine, which is desperately trying to gain Mr. Trump’s support as negotiations for a peace deal with Vladimir Putin develop, is signaling to Washington that it will buy U.S. gas in addition to trying to cut a deal on mineral revenues.
Ukraine’s moves mirror a wider push in Europe to buy more gas from the U.S. as Mr. Trump engages the European Union in tit-for-tat tariffs.
The state-owned gas company in India, one of the world’s fastest growing markets for gas, said it would either buy a stake in an American L.N.G. plant or enter into a new contract for long-term supply.
Speaking at the conference in Houston, the head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, Sultan al Jaber, who just a year and a half ago presided over the annual climate-change negotiations in the United Arab Emirates, said his company would also soon announce a major investment in U.S. gas production. “Make energy great again,” he told a room full of oil and gas executives.
The negotiations Mr. al Jaber shepherded in 2023 were the first in which all nations agreed to “transition away” from fossil fuels by midcentury. But a key clause in the agreement noted that “transitional fuels” — widely acknowledged as a euphemism for gas — would be key to making the transition “orderly.”
The potential deals pit climate concerns against foreign-policy strategy. Expanding gas consumption — purchasing contracts are usually for decades worth of fuel — would in many cases complicate carbon-neutrality pledges that companies and countries have made.
Gas emits less carbon dioxide than oil and coal when burned, but is nearly entirely made up of methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas. U.S. methane emissions have been steadily rising as its gas industry has grown to dominate the world’s trade in the fuel.
The new U.S. energy secretary, Chris Wright, is a former fracking executive. In an interview in Houston he said the Biden administration’s temporary pause in early 2024 on federal approvals for new export terminals had made countries wary of investing in U.S. gas, despite the fact that L.N.G. exports soared under President Biden.
Mr. Wright said he had been meeting with prospective buyers in Europe and Asia and they had all been asking him, “Can you assure me that the United States is going to be a long-term reliable supplier?”
Xi Nan, who heads Rystad Energy’s L.N.G. research team, said that because of the long timelines for developing any gas project, announcements shouldn’t be taken as inevitabilities.
“Fundamentally, our forecasts haven’t changed in terms of long-term L.N.G. demand,” Ms. Xi said. “What’s changed is that the forecast for renewable energy demand is lower.”
As a result, the energy transition “is going to take longer than we thought,” she said.
