America Is the World’s Largest Oil Producer. So Why Is Losing Russia’s Oil Such a Big Deal?

In December, in a ballet of global logistics, more than 30 tankers ferrying liquid natural gas from the United States to various destinations around the globe—Japan, Brazil, South Africa—canceled their trips and set a new course for the European Union. On the days they pulled into port, the U.S. supplied more natural gas to Europe than Russia did.

This represented more than a minor milestone in global energy history. As recently as the mid-2000s, energy companies fretted that the U.S. would soon run out of natural gas. Now, thanks to the U.S.-invented technology of hydrofracturing, or fracking, the country produces more gas than it can consume. “As in World War II and other crises, America has Europe’s back,” Mike Sommers, the chief executive of the American Petroleum Institute, wrote last week. (The institute, despite its scholastic name, is Washington’s leading lobbyist for the oil-and-gas industry.)

Or … does it? Upon closer inspection, the fleet demonstrated not the raw power of American industry, but the inescapable supremacy of the market. The ships, after all, did not change course because the State Department had requisitioned the gas. The freedom-loving people of Houston had not donated gas to their Lithuanian kin. No, the tankers’ journey to Europe was choreographed by the same force that every year sends cardiologists