Is LNG the next oil? By Willhemina Wahlin “There’s a joke from the early days of the oil business,” write Daniel Yergin and Michael Stoppard, in “The Next Prize,” an article in Foreign Affairs in 2003. “A geologist reporting back on drilling a wildcat exploratory well says, ‘the bad news is that we didn’t find oil. The good news is that we didn’t find gas’.” Little did the early oil tycoons know that natural gas would have the last laugh, thanks largely and ironically to the emergence of its liquefied form, Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG)—and no country on earth is currently laughing louder than Japan, the largest importer of LNG in the world. The Japanese government views LNG as vital to its strategy to reduce the nation’s oil dependence, as well as a key ingredient in its post-Kyoto Protocol recipe for alternative fuels, and is actively promoting LNG through subsidies. Japanese corporations have been securing their lead position in every link of the global LNG supply chain, through the f
