The Company Behind the Dakota Access Pipeline Is Being Sold for $21 Billion. Is Trump the Reason Why?
Nov. 21 2016 4:05 PM
By Daniel Gross
[ to the end ]
There’s a second factor weighing in favor of natural gas pipelines. During the Obama years, natural gas exports grew rapidly—rising more than threefold between August 2008 and August 2016. Most of those exports travel via pipeline across the southern border to Mexico. But this year, for the first time, natural gas—and liquids derived from natural gas—is being piped onto ships at terminals in Louisiana and Pennsylvania that are bound for Europe, South America, and Asia. There is surely much more of that to come. (Sunoco owns a storage facility at the Marcus Hook terminal in Pennsylvania, which is one of the places from which shipments of natural gas derivatives are shipped overseas.)
So, call it a Trump deal if you want. But the rise in demand for the cleanest-burning fossil fuel—and for the conduits that carry to them—is predicated largely on the displacement of coal and the formation of new global trade routes. And Trump has nothing to do with those facts.