Oklahoma Congressman Steve Russell (R) has hit upon an idea that he says President Obama’s trade team appears to support—-one of exporting U.S. natural gas to China in exchange for Chinese bond debt.
“What they don’t have is an abundance of natural resources, so why don’t we trade natural gas for Chinese bond debt?” asked the U.S. Representative during a Tuesday morning interview on “Mitchell in the Morning” on radio KOKC.
He met recently with the Chinese minister in Washington, D.C. and proposed the idea to him.
“I’ve been able to sell this idea to the White House,” continued Russell.” They’re concerned about air quality because the pollution in Chinese cities is awful. It would make Los Angeles look like clean air in the 70s.”
The congressman said he’s been to China and suffered the burning throat and eyes while visibility was only one-quarter of a mile.
“If we use gasified electric power plants, we eliminate that power problem. When you fix a Chinese city, you’re literally fixing a country because Shanghai has the same population as Canada,” said Rep. Russell.
Now it’s a matter of convincing Democrats and the White House to follow through with his proposal.
“They want clean air, okay. We have an abundance of natural gas so make concessions so we can export that,” added Russell. “That’s the stuff we need to be working on—not the size of people’s hands.”
But there’s a challenge with the congressman’s proposal. China has more LNG than it needs. With the North American shale boom, natural gas production ballooned and companies prepared to ship massive quanitities overseas when they were allowed to ship LNG. But China produces its own LNG, at least for domestic use. And its LNG purchases dropped 51 percent last September from a record in January 2014. In essence, it’s become a buyer’s market worldwide, especially in Asia where some of the lowest prices are seen since at least 2010.
