http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/analysispaper/global/worldlng.html

LNG is Natural Gas compressed to a ratio of about 600-to-1 volume-wise, for transporting. This second EIA page says," Shipping accounts for 10 to 30 percent of the delivered value of LNG (depending on the distance from the reserves to the market)." I'm not sure if the liquification/gasification process on either end is include in that. I would assume it is as part of the larger %30 number.

It is not hard to figure these things out however. an hour on google will provide you with a wealth of information about the different components of the LNG delivery system.

You cannot of course burn LNG, you need to first regasify it into regular NG. Once it is in gaseous form it is the same commodity on the consumer end and it is this consumer price that matters. You will see slightly different prices for LNG vs NG at the wholesale level in different parts of the world, but this probably has more to do with the fact that the two are selling in two different markets - one buyer may not have the ability to regasify the product and therefore would not be in the market for LNG.

It looks like NG has spiked to a worldwide average of about $9-10 per 1000 cubic feet. This is still, in my estimation, low. NG follows the basic course of crude oil prices on a BTU-basis. As we see oil move to $100+, $20 for NG is going to be the norm.

As this price goes up, producers will do what it takes to move the product to market.

At higher prices the costs of shipping/deliver/processing as e percentage of the total cost obviously goes down.

That Russian-German pipeline that they just broke ground on will be moving 1% of the world's daily usage. Fairly significant. The UK has only two options - oil or gas. There is no hydrogen economy yet - as far as I can see. So if they don't want to import more oil, I think they'll be moving some of that gas from Germany to Holland to the UK.

A rough analogy could be made regarding the fact that a certain amount of fruits and vegetables spoil on their way to market, but we don't care about how much, because it's only the price at the user's end that's of interest to the user.

However, and this is a BIG however, when you are considering issues of required production and the projected life of fossil fuel reserves, the EROEI is of extreme importance.

If I have to put 5 units of energy into the production/distrubition 'black box' to make 4 units available at the point of use, that's one thing. But if I have to put 10 units of energy into the black box to make the same 4 units available at the point of use, that's something else again - something far less desirable from a depletion standpoint, regardless of what price is attached to that energy.

So, when we see gross production figures of say X million bpd of crude oil or Y million cubic ft of natural gas, we are missing a vital piece of information - and that is: what fraction of X and Y are actually being made available at the point of use?