The LP delivery truck came through Friendship on Thursday. The price of propane didn’t go down, and it won’t, because the price of propane in Adams County is set by the same market that sets the price of liquefied natural gas loading onto a tanker in Louisiana.
Monday morning, Nymex natural gas opened down a penny and a quarter, to $3.082 per million Btu. The trigger was weather. A trade note from Gary Cunningham at Tradition Energy said the near-term forecast had turned bearish over the past week: near-normal temperatures east of the Rockies for the rest of the month, trimming power-sector demand. A Middle East peace deal between the United States and Iran — the kind of geopolitical event that just last week was rattling oil markets — was an afterthought. “The strait has little to do with it,” Cunningham wrote.
He’s right, and the reason he’s right is the story the market is telling whether the administration admits it or not.
The Strait of Hormuz used to be the price-setting choke point for American natural gas. If Iran closed it, or threatened to, every gas consumer in the world adjusted. But the United States spent a decade building liquefied-natural-gas terminals on the Gulf Coast — Sabine Pass, Cove Point, Freeport, Cameron, Calcasieu Pass — and in the past year, two of the largest new facilities, Plaquemines and Corpus Christi Stage 3, began ramping up. By next year, total U.S. LNG export capacity is projected at fifteen to sixteen billion cubic feet per day, up from twelve in 2024. Every molecule is contracted to buyers in Asia and Europe on twenty-year agreements. It is leaving, and it is not coming back.
That is why traders can dismiss a Middle East peace deal. American gas is already spoken for. The price is set not by what happens in the Persian Gulf but by how much Gulf Coast terminal capacity is online. The peace deal does not free up supply for American households because the supply was sold before the deal was announced.
This is not a market failure. This is policy. On January 26, 2024, the Biden administration paused approvals for new LNG exports to non-free-trade-agreement countries, pending a review. The DOE’s own review, released in December 2024, found that expanded LNG exports would raise domestic gas and electricity prices and increase global greenhouse gas emissions. On January 20, 2025, the Trump administration lifted the pause by executive order. The DOE, under Secretary Wright, released a follow-up in May 2025 that reversed the prior conclusion, claiming expanded exports would have “no discernable impact to global greenhouse gas emissions.” New authorizations were issued to Commonwealth LNG, Venture Global’s CP2, Delfin, and Lake Charles.
The administration calls this energy dominance. It calls it strength. It calls it selling American energy to our allies. The terminal construction employs thousands of welders, pipefitters, and electricians along the Gulf Coast, and for those workers the boom is real — as long as it lasts. But construction is temporary, and the twenty-year contracts are not. When the last pipe is welded at Plaquemines, the gas keeps flowing, the export revenue keeps flowing, and the domestic price signal keeps climbing. The permanent cost lands on every household that heats with gas in a county where nobody works at the terminal.
Wendell Berry has a name for the mind that does this. In The Unsettling of America, he called it the extractive mind — the disposition that treats land, resources, and communities as inputs to a production process whose benefits flow elsewhere and whose costs stay local. The LNG export terminals are the extractive mind applied to molecules. The gas is produced from American wells. It flows through American pipelines to American ports. It is loaded onto tankers by American workers. And it leaves. What remains is the price signal, and the price signal says that the gas in your LP tank is competing with a buyer in Guangzhou.
The co-op members in Adams-Columbia Electric Cooperative territory — my territory — are paying the global price for a domestic resource while the administration tells them this is what winning looks like. The DOE’s own December study found that expanded LNG exports would raise domestic gas prices. The co-op members in Friendship don’t need a study to tell them — they can read it on their heating bills. The LP truck came through on Thursday, and the driver said it’s been a slow summer for deliveries, which is what happens when a warm forecast trims demand. But the price per gallon did not come down with the weather, because the price per gallon is not set by the weather in Friendship. It is set by the weather in Shanghai and the terminal utilization rate at Sabine Pass.
The market’s indifference to the Iran peace deal this morning was not a quirk. It was a structural disclosure. When a Middle East peace agreement cannot move American gas prices because American gas is already committed to export, the price of heating your home is no longer yours to negotiate. It is a function of what the terminal capacity will bear and what the administration has authorized to leave.
Winter is coming. The heating bills are coming with it. The administration promised that energy dominance would mean cheap, abundant American energy for American households. The market, this morning, priced in the reality that the cheap part was exported and the abundance is going to Asia. The promise broke, and the price stayed, and the warmth left the county in a tanker on the Gulf Coast.