The co-founder of the company building the LNG facility at Jaxport is all for exporting natural gas, even if it means rising domestic prices.

Remember T. Boone Pickens is a co-founder of Clean Energy Co.? Paul Toscano wrote for CNBC 15 May 2013, Boone Pickens on Gas Exports: ‘Move It Out and Sell It’,

“The producers have gone out and drilled for the natural gas. They should be entitled to get the best markets in the world, so let them have it,” the chairman of BP Capital Management and proponent of natural gas told “Squawk on the Street.”

“Why would you try to keep natural gas prices down to favor other industries?” Pickens asked. “It doesn’t make sense. When you export that natural gas, you’re going to create a lot of jobs.

“Go ahead and move it out and sell it,” he said. “I’d go ahead and let the gas go into the global market.”

So what does he expect LNG exports to do to domestic U.S. natural gas prices?

When asked about the response of U.S. companies, such as the private firm Koch Industries, to the prospect of rising natural gas prices, Pickens said they had already benefited from cheap natural gas.

“That’s fine—that’s America, and that’s the way it should be,” he said. “But they should allow the producers to export if they want to export.”

Pickens expects exports to make domestic prices go up. This is because as Matthew Phillips wrote for Bloomberg BusinessWeek 22 August 2013, in Asia and Europe “prices are as much as five times higher”.

And maybe we’ve got one fossil fuel magnate against others, which would be quite interesting. Unfortunately not, though, since the same CNBC story includes a followup from Koch Industries saying:

“We agree with Mr. Pickens’ position on exports—to be clear, we are fully in favor of the freedom to export LNG.”

And of course Pickens dismisses concerns about fracking:

He dismissed environmental concerns over hydraulic fracking, adding that they are a recent phenomenon.

“Nobody ever said anything until recently,” Pickens said. “We have fracked over 800,000 wells in Oklahoma and Texas, and nobody has ever complained about it. This is something that has been proven over and over again that this is safe. So proceed and get the natural gas out of the ground and use it.”

Really? Maybe Pickens hasn’t been listening.

Meanwhile, does anybody have any doubts that Pickens’ “Clean Energy” LNG facility at Jaxport will end up exporting LNG soon?

Here’s video, including Pickens’ advice to environmentalists, “Get lost!”

-jsq

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