Despite a stop in new natural gas exports under the Biden administration, the United States continues to ship a large amount of the commodity across the world. Last year, it exported 88.9 million metric tons of natural gas, becoming the world's largest provider. One would expect that this would result in cheaper natural gas for Americans. However, the contrary is now true.

A recent National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) working paper contends that the United States' dominance in global natural gas markets imposes a tax on American consumers, more than tripling the price they paid when the United States kept much of its natural gas for itself.

U.S. liquified natural gas exports have linked U.S. gas prices to global markets, particularly the price of oil — in contrast to the situation prior to LNG exports, in which a flood of fracked gas and limited export options kept domestic wholesale gas prices far below world levels," write economists James H. Stock of Harvard and Matthew Zaragoza-Watkins of the University of California Davis.

Because so much was stuck ashore, US gas prices, which had traditionally been linked to oil prices, began to do their own, less expensive thing. However, as American natural gas became un-stuck, it resumed trading as a worldwide commodity rather than something exclusive to Americans. Economists predict that by 2030, US prices will be 54% higher than they would be in a less export-intensive situation. The report compares the increase to the equivalent of a $30-per-ton carbon tax on natural gas emissions.

A few decades ago, U.S. energy corporations developed new means to bring long-buried natural gas supplies to the surface using hydraulic fracturing (or fracking), in which they excavated extremely deep holes in the earth and then injected liquid into them to drive the gas out.

The United States once imported more natural gas than it exported, primarily from Canada. However, as it increased its reliance on fracking in the mid-2010s, its import-export ratio began to shift, and by 2017, the United States was officially sending out more gas than it was importing. The fracking boom reverberated throughout local economies, spawning a new breed of billionaires.

America eventually produced so much natural gas that it ceased importing it and began exporting it in massive quantities. However, as all of those exports reintegrated the United States into global markets, the benefit of all that local supply faded.