David Hood

Louisiana figured out how to turn $3 of natural gas into $300. That's why SpaceX, Meta, Amazon and Hyundai are all pouring money into the same state at the same time. The rocket is the easiest place to see it. SpaceX is spending $100 billion on what Elon calls the biggest launch site on Earth, down in Vermilion Parish. That same parish is home to Henry Hub, the pipeline junction where the price of natural gas gets set for the entire country. And Starship burns liquid methane, which is basically natural gas chilled until it turns into a liquid. Once you see that, the rest of Louisiana's $300 billion project map clicks into place. Almost every pin on it is a different way to sell the same gas. Six of them are export terminals. They chill the gas to minus 260°F until it shrinks 600 times over and fits on a tanker. Louisiana handled 61% of America's LNG exports in 2024, and no country on the planet exports more LNG than America does. A lot of the others are gas turned into something you'd never guess. The ammonia plants pull hydrogen out of methane and bond it to nitrogen from the air to make fertilizer. Lake Charles Methanol turns it into methanol. Hyundai's $5.8 billion mill uses gas to rip the oxygen out of iron ore, then melts the iron into steel for its car plants in Alabama and Georgia. Shintech takes gas liquids and salt and makes PVC pipe out of them. Then you get to the data centers, which are the newest way to ship Louisiana gas out of Louisiana. Entergy is building 10 gas plants just to feed Meta's Hyperion campus in Richland Parish. The seven newest add 5,200 megawatts by themselves, about five times what New Orleans uses on a typical day. Amazon put its campuses outside Shreveport, right on top of the Haynesville Shale. Here's where the $300 comes from. A million BTUs of gas goes for about $2.90 at Henry Hub right now. Burn it in a modern gas plant and you get roughly 150 kilowatt-hours of electricity. That's enough to run one Nvidia H100, plus its share of the server and the cooling, for about 100 hours. AI companies rent those chips for around $3 an hour, so the same $2.90 of gas ends up worth about $300. So every company on that map wants to do something with the gas before it leaves the state. A hundredfold markup will do that. Starship pushes it furthest. A fully fueled Starship holds more than 5,000 tons of propellant, and roughly a fifth of that is liquid methane. Elon wants 30 flights a day out of Starbase Louisiana. At that pace you're looking at around 1.7 billion cubic feet of gas a day, close to a tenth of everything America currently exports as LNG, all going up through one launch site. The timing works out pretty well for the people drilling it. Gas got so cheap this fall that EQT and Expand Energy, the two biggest producers in the country, said they'd hold back output until prices come back up. Spot gas at Henry Hub fell to $2.52 on October 27, the lowest it's been since November 2024. Every project on that map is a long-term buyer for gas the drillers can't get a good price for today. When SpaceX explained why it picked Louisiana, the whole answer fit in one line, "you need ample gas, and you need the right trajectories." Every other company on that map showed up for the first half of that sentence.