Ending Energy Poverty

USLNG is the fastest, most reliable path to ending energy poverty at scale.

At a Glance

  • More than 700 million people have no access to electricity. Billions more rely on wood, charcoal, and animal dung for cooking—fuels that kill, impoverish, and pollute.
  • Energy poverty, as DOE Sec. Chris Wright has argued, is the world’s most urgent humanitarian crisis.
  • Access to reliable, affordable energy is the single most powerful driver of economic development, human health, and national security.
  • USLNG is the fastest, most scalable path to ending energy poverty in the developing world.

The Refrigerator That Changed Everything

In 2013, Todd Moss, then a senior U.S. diplomat and later founder of the Energy for Growth Hub, bought a refrigerator. The yellow energy efficiency tag said it would use 459 kilowatt-hours per year. That morning, Moss had been working with electricity consumption data, and he suddenly realized something: his single American kitchen appliance would use more electricity than most people living in Africa consume in an entire year. He made a simple graphic illustrating the gap. It went viral. It launched a think tank. And it remains the most powerful illustration of the global energy divide ever made.

The Crisis the World Ignores

Energy poverty kills. Women and children breathing smoke from wood and charcoal fires suffer lung disease, eye damage, and premature death at rates that dwarf many diseases dominating global health headlines.

More than 700 million people have no electricity at all. Billions more have access that is unreliable, unaffordable, or both. Without power, there are no refrigerated medicines, no functioning hospitals after dark, no productive factories, no air conditioning in a warming world, and no pathway out of poverty. Electrification is not one development goal among many. It is the precondition for all the others.

The Energy for Growth Hub calls this the Modern Energy Minimum—the threshold of reliable, affordable electricity that enables real economic participation: powering a business, running medical equipment, keeping food cold, charging a phone. A single dim lightbulb does not meet it. Most development finance has aimed too low for too long.

What USLNG Can Do

Natural gas is the ideal fuel for closing the energy gap in the developing world. It is cleaner than coal, more reliable than intermittent renewables, and dispatchable on demand. A nation replacing coal-fired power with gas cuts CO2 emissions by ≈50%, eliminates most particulate and sulfur emissions immediately, and gains a reliable baseload electricity supply that can underpin economic growth for decades.

USLNG makes this possible at scale. The United States is the world’s largest LNG exporter, with more than 90 mtpa of additional export capacity under construction. American natural gas is abundant, competitively priced, and produced under environmental standards exceeding those of any other major supplier.

The nations that need this most include South and Southeast Asia, where hundreds of millions lack reliable electricity and coal remains dominant; Sub-Saharan Africa, where electrification rates are among the world’s lowest; and Latin America and the Caribbean, where energy poverty coexists with significant untapped potential for gas-powered development.

USLNG exports bring a second benefit that is less discussed but equally important. The production of natural gas yields natural gas liquids as co-products—including propane, which can be exported as liquefied petroleum gas (LPG). More USLNG means more USLPG. And for the hundreds of millions of households in the developing world that will never be reached by a gas pipeline or a power grid, a propane cylinder and a clean-burning burner may be the most practical, immediate path off of wood and charcoal. India’s Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana program has connected more than 80 million low-income households to LPG cooking fuel—demonstrating at scale what affordable, portable energy can do for human health and family welfare. The model is replicable. The fuel is available. The missing piece is supply.

[See USLNG by the Numbers for current export volumes, active offtake contracts, projects under construction, and capacity coming online.]

The False Choice

Some argue that developing nations should leapfrog fossil fuels entirely and go “100% renewables.” This argument is not supported by evidence. Intermittent renewables require grid stability most developing nations do not yet have. Battery storage at grid scale remains expensive. As Energy for Growth Hub has documented, pressuring energy-poor countries to forgo natural gas while wealthy nations built their prosperity on it is not climate justice—it is climate hypocrisy.

The choice is not between natural gas and a clean energy future. It is between natural gas and continued energy poverty, continued coal combustion, and continued preventable death. USLNG is not the enemy of the energy transition. For billions of people, it is the energy transition.

America’s Responsibility

The United States is uniquely positioned to lead. We have the resource base, the technology, the export infrastructure, and the democratic institutions that make us a trustworthy long-term energy partner. Unlike pipeline gas from authoritarian producers, USLNG is traded in a global, competitive, liquid market. No single government controls it. No adversary can weaponize it.

The Energy for Growth Hub has proposed U.S. Energy Security Compacts—fast, lean bilateral agreements that deploy American development finance tools (USTDA, EXIM, DFC) to spur energy investment in partner nations, advancing both American economic interests and global energy access simultaneously. LNG Allies supports this architecture and has worked to advance it through relationships with each of these agencies.

Expanding USLNG exports to energy-poor nations is not only good economics. It is the right thing to do.

To discuss how USLNG can help your nation address energy poverty, connect with LNG Allies President Fred Hutchison on LinkedIn.

Selected References