There’s a particular kind of quiet that settles over energy markets right before a price move. Not the dramatic kind—more like everyone checking the same numbers and pretending they aren’t worried.
Right now, that worry is about liquefied natural gas, or LNG, and a bottleneck that just won’t unclench. The closing of the Strait of Hormuz stranded tankers from Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, which together provide 20 percent of global LNG. Asia has been hit especially hard because it imports 80 percent to 90 percent of the supply from the Persian Gulf. And even if the strait reopens, Misryoum newsroom reported that it will not restore all of the lost supply.
The strain is coming from multiple directions at once. In mid-March, Iranian missiles knocked out 17 percent of capacity at Qatar’s Ras Laffan refinery. QatarEnergy’s CEO said repairs could take five years—long enough that “temporary” may start to feel like a lie. Tankers can wait, crews can reroute, but supply chains don’t just snap back because a passage clears. For buyers, every week off schedule becomes a reshuffle of contracts and spot prices, and that, in turn, tends to bleed into electricity bills.
The United States, meanwhile, is pitching itself as a stabilizer—partly because it wants to be. Misryoum editorial desk noted that the United States has made an aggressive push to be a bigger part of the global LNG market, with Trump seeking to secure major purchase agreements from trade partners like Japan, the EU, and South Korea. The problem is that the existing machinery is already booked. The eight existing US LNG export terminals are running at full capacity. Even with a vow to bring more capacity online, construction and permitting of the complex multibillion-dollar facilities take years. So there’s ambition—lots of it—and there’s reality, which moves slower.
As a result, US exports of LNG, about 15 billion cubic feet of gas per day, are currently limited to only 11 percent to 13 percent of total US natural gas production. That leaves the United States with an abundance of its top fuel for electricity even while other countries are scrambling to stretch their supplies. It’s the odd contrast that makes people feel like the world is on fire while their own house is—mostly—still warm.
Even so, American consumers haven’t exactly been spared. Misryoum analysis indicates sharply rising electricity prices are being driven by reasons unrelated to the war—mostly due to the capital build-out by utility companies. That expansion is partly aimed at accommodating the data center explosion, but also to build resilience against wildfire, storms, and other climate change impacts, and to replace aging infrastructure. So the pain at the meter has a domestic address.
In their bi-monthly video series, Misryoum newsroom reported energy analysts at the Center for Strategic and International Studies contemplated how the best example of US energy independence is almost wholly unnoticed by American consumers because of these other factors. “So while we’re staring at the precipice of a global energy crisis, or might already be in one, the United States is going to feel that in oil markets, but we are, for the time being, by the nature of the gas system and the bountiful supply here in the United States, insulated against the gas price shocks?” asked Joseph Majkut, director of the CSIS’ Energy Security and Climate Change program. And honestly, even that “for the time being” feels like the key phrase—because the next shock could be another refinery, another strait, another delay. Or maybe it’s the same one, just spreading outward in a slower wave.
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