Bar­ba­dos has start­ed im­port­ing liqui­fied nat­ur­al gas (LNG) from the Unit­ed States and is pay­ing as much as dou­ble the amount at which the com­mod­i­ty is sold by T&T, ac­cord­ing to a re­port by the US De­part­ment of En­er­gy's Of­fice of Fos­sil En­er­gy.

The re­port, which tracks LNG im­port and ex­port da­ta for the US for the first four months of the year, shows that five ship­ments of US LNG left the port of Hialeah, Flori­da, be­tween Feb­ru­ary 5 and April 29 bound for Bar­ba­dos. The ship­ments to­talled 7.4 mil­lion cu­bic feet of LNG and fetched prices as high as US$15.78 per mil­lion British ther­mal units (mmb­tu), with the low­est price be­ing US$10/mmb­tu.

The high­est price T&T has fetched for LNG ex­ports to the US this year was US$6.70/mmb­tu. There were no ex­ports by the Unit­ed States to any oth­er coun­try in the Caribbean, mak­ing this the first in­cur­sion by the US in­to T&T's tra­di­tion­al Cari­com mar­ket. Ac­cord­ing to the re­port, T&T is now the on­ly coun­try in the world that ex­ports LNG to the US. A to­tal of 34.8 bil­lion cu­bic feet (bcf) was ex­port­ed be­tween Jan­u­ary and April this year. Oth­er com­pet­ing na­tions, in­clud­ing Egypt, Nige­ria, Nor­way, Qatar and Yemen, have not ex­port­ed any LNG to the US this year.

T&T ex­port­ed 12 bil­lion cu­bic feet of LNG in Jan­u­ary. How­ev­er, that fig­ure dropped to 9.6 bcf in Feb­ru­ary, 8.5 bcf in March and 4.7 bcf in April. Over­all, this still rep­re­sents an in­crease of 1 bil­lion cu­bic feet over the cor­re­spond­ing pe­ri­od for 2015, dur­ing which 33.8 bcf was ex­port­ed. Two short-term ship­ments from this coun­try in Jan­u­ary and Feb­ru­ary amount­ing to 2 bcf, that net­ted US$6.70/mmb­tu per ship­ment, while 15 oth­er ship­ments over the pe­ri­od net­ted prices rang­ing from US$5.83/mmb­tu to US$1.45/mmb­tu.

T&T ex­port­ed a fur­ther 15 bil­lion cu­bic feet of LNG to US ter­ri­to­ry, Puer­to Ri­co dur­ing the same pe­ri­od. The most valu­able of those ship­ments net­ted US$6.96/mmb­tu.

In Feb­ru­ary the first ex­port of LNG from the con­ti­nen­tal US right was made in­to an over­sup­plied glob­al gas mar­ket, sig­ni­fy­ing a new role for the US in the glob­al en­er­gy are­na in what could be a chang­ing dy­nam­ic in the glob­al gas mar­ket. The shale-gas boom has made the US the world's largest nat­ur­al gas pro­duc­er. Ad­vances in drilling tech­niques, in­clud­ing hy­draulic frac­tur­ing, or frack­ing, have boost­ed US pro­duc­tion of the fu­el by 35 per cent

This coun­try was once the dom­i­nant play­er in the US LNG mar­ket ac­count­ing for 70 per cent of all LNG im­port­ed in­to the US. How­ev­er, fol­low­ing the shale rev­o­lu­tion in the US, lo­cal LNG pro­duc­ers moved out of the US mar­ket and di­ver­si­fied their car­goes to places where they could fetch high­er prices.