During President Trump’s inauguration speech, he promised to unlock the “liquid gold” beneath Americans’ feet and ramp up fossil fuel production. Doing so, he suggested, would lower gas prices and lead to cascading American wealth. In his executive order declaring a “national energy emergency,” he directed the Department of Energy to resume processing LNG export authorizations and prioritizing the development of LNG in Alaska.

There is no actual “energy emergency”—at least not in the sense Trump means. Under former president Joe Biden, the United States was already pumping out record amounts of oil and gas. And growing evidence suggests that Trump’s plan to maximize LNG exports will actually achieve the opposite of his stated goal: Two January reports show that increased US LNG exports will drive up domestic gas prices, with most of those LNG profits winding up overseas in the coffers of foreign investment firms, with particular advantages for China.

Money from LNG goes to foreign investors

The first report, from the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, found that a startling proportion of US LNG profits go to foreign investment firms. Researchers found that 14 investment firms, from eight foreign countries, have financed 11.5 billion cubic feet per day in US LNG export capacity—about 78 percent of peak US LNG export capacity in 2023.

For example, the Golden Pass LNG terminal in Texas is 70 percent owned by QatarEnergy, a firm owned by the Qatari state. That could explain why Qatar’s energy minister said last month that he wasn’t worried about US competition in the LNG world—in fact, he thinks Trump is “good for business.”

About 83 percent of Freeport LNG terminal, also in Texas, belongs to investment firms in Australia and Japan. The Driftwood LNG terminal is 100 percent owned by the Australian firm Woodside Energy. Companies based in Canada, France, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia also own sizable chunks of equity in US LNG terminals.

“Trump says LNG terminals existing on US soil will generate some positive impact on the economy, [but] this is obviously an oversimplification of the LNG market,” said Nichole Heil, author of the report, who added she was surprised by the extent of foreign ownership they uncovered. Instead, “we’re seeing more and more foreign investment in US LNG projects, which will divert profits away from US companies.” Any profits will go to firms like QatarEnergy, while even “everyday people who invest in the stock market are not really going to see financial gains from any potential LNG profits.”

This reality should change the calculus around how LNG serves the public interest. To determine that, the DOE has previously referred to a 2018 study concluding that higher energy prices would be balanced out by higher revenue for American companies and households. But when the DOE released its updated study in December 2024, it acknowledged that study is out of date: The situation has “dramatically shifted,” and LNG exports are set to increase domestic prices by 30 percent.

And that won’t get balanced out by revenue, since so much of that money goes overseas. “It’s unclear to me how those revenue flows might end up back in the pockets of everyday Americans,” said Heil.

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 More leverage for China

And then there’s this report from the American Security Project, also released in January. It found that LNG exports are causing price volatility—and handing geopolitical advantages to China.

Chris Wright and Doug Burgum, Trump’s heads of Energy and Interior, respectively, have already begun to reverse Biden policies and push for unlimited LNG exports. Earlier this week, Trump nominated a fossil fuel executive with LNG export plans to be in charge of approving LNG export applications. But “the US LNG industry’s plans for rapid growth are increasingly disconnected from international partners and global gas demand,” warns the report.

China is the world’s largest importer of LNG. Since China buys in bulk, it’s able to strike good deals with big multinational companies, like BP and Shell, which are happy to sell massive volumes of LNG to China at bargain rates. Trump’s favorite rival then subsidizes its “growth and influence by reselling cheap US LNG at higher spot prices.” China does that by stockpiling gas in vast quantities—in fact, there’s currently more American LNG in China than there is in the US.

“They store them until smaller countries around them are struggling,” explained Courtney Manning, the report’s editor. “Let’s say a big flood happens and everybody’s turning on gas generators, or there’s a really cold winter and everybody’s using gas heating in Thailand or Malaysia or Cambodia. China will then resell that US LNG that it stockpiled months ago, and they will mark it up 4, 5, 6, 10, 20 times what it was originally sold to them for. So they make a huge profit importing these massive volumes of cheap LNG from the US and then reselling it.”

Manning’s report builds on her October research, which also found cheap US LNG exports are subsidizing China’s renewable energy development and fueling its authoritarian aims. Trump seems to believe he can create leverage by threatening to cut off US gas supply to China, says Manning—but that probably won’t work either.

“You can really only use that lever once,” said Manning. China imports just 5 percent of their total LNG from the US but accounts for about 20 percent of US LNG exports. “So if Trump was to say, ‘Hey, China, you’ve gone too far. We’re going to pull the plug and you’re not going to get US LNG," then, unfortunately, what that means is our own producers would be stuck with this almost completely useless product with no demand from other regions,” since South Korea, Japan, and Europe are all projected to drastically reduce their demand for gas over the next few years. China began to lean on its own lever this week, imposing tariffs on LNG to hit back at Trump.

In other words: Trump’s LNG glut is handing advantages to China. Not exactly in line with Trump’s “America First” philosophy.

The buildout will also raise prices in a couple ways. For one, shipping gas overseas means less supply at home, driving up prices. Second, “the approvals he [Trump] is planning on streamlining for new [gas] production facilities are going to take between five and 10 years of very high cost investments.” To pay for those facilities, in the short term, oil and gas companies are “going to have to raise prices. And those prices will probably stay high.”

It was already no secret that US LNG exports will drive up domestic gas prices. Last month’s analysis from Biden’s exiting DOE affirmed as much. And the industry knows it too.

On January 23, Trump gave a virtual address to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, guaranteeing a steady supply of LNG to Europe. Patrick Pouyanne, CEO of TotalEnergies, the fourth-largest oil and gas company in the world, then asked Trump about the specter of rising gas prices. “Some experts fear that if there are too many projects developed in the US in LNG, this could have an inflationary impact on US domestic gas prices,” said Pouyanne. “What would happen if you observed an increase in domestic gas prices because of these exports?”

Trump dismissed the idea. “I disagree with one—I think the more that you do [gas exports], the lower the price is going to go,” he insisted.

That isn’t true. But truth hasn’t stopped him yet.