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Under the Trump administration, exports of crude oil and liquefied natural gas (LNG) are through the roof.
“We’re continuing to ramp up US natural gas exports; it will be a record again this year, it was a record last year,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright told CNBC this week.
Wright said the U.S. was up to 20 Bcf of natural gas per day, or billion cubic feet, which he said was “roughly double the second and third largest exporters of natural gas, Qatar being one of those two countries.”
He acknowledged that oil demand and LNG have increased amid the closure of the Strait of Hormuz due to the ongoing war with Iran.
“Now of course, demand is growing too, [the] price mechanism right now is gonna reduce the growth of LNG this year, but that’s a temporary interruption – traffic will be flowing through the Straits of Hormuz as soon as we can…certainly sometime this summer at least,” Wright noted.
Before the onset of the war with Iran, the U.S. Energy Department had already achieved “record-high levels of output” in oil and gas production, hitting 13.6 million barrels per day, according to the agency. Natural gas was also expected to hit 109 Bcf per day in 2026.
Right now, the United States is the world’s largest exporter of LNG, and as demand for American energy has increased amid energy crises overseas, Wright said the U.S. was adding the ability to export even more every day.
Wright stated that America is adding “about two and a half Bcf a day of export capacity in the United States just this year – so a quarter of that will be filled by growth from US exports today.”
Offsetting high export capacity for crude oil (which has risen roughly 37 percent since last year, according to recent data) and LNG is rising prices for domestic gasoline for American citizens. The average price per gallon as of May 15 was $4.51, with prices in states like California spiking as high as $6.00 per gallon, via data from GasBuddy.
“We’ve taken extraordinary measures to keep gas prices lower than they are in some other parts of the world, and they will go down,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a recent interview with NBC.
The Department of Energy has released 17.5 million barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to keep prices artificially deflated, as of data published on April 30, marking the most released at one time since 2022. The DOE is also currently in the process of releasing 172 million barrels of crude oil from the SPR.
Secretary Rubio continued, “Those Straits will be open, and you will see those prices go down, and actually I think you’re going to see a dramatic reduction in [prices] over time because all of that pent-up oil that’s being held hostage by Iran, once that reaches the marketplace, it’ll have a very positive impact.”
