Do you know what the world’s 13 largest oil companies have in common? Not a single one of them is a publicly traded company. That’s right – every single one of them is state-owned. Major multinationals such as ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, ConocoPhillips, and British Petroleum fall way down this long list, which is topped by government-controlled entities such as Saudi Aramco, Gazprom, China National Petroleum Corp., National Iranian Oil Co., Petróleos de Venezuela, Petrobras, and Petronas.

Why does this matter? Let’s take a look at how Russia’s Gazprom became the world’s largest natural gas producer. The company didn’t spend billions exploring and developing new fields. It did it the easy way, as the Wall Street Journal reports:

In December 2006, the Russian government informed Shell, Mitsubishi and Mitsui that it had revoked their environmental permits as project managers for the $22 billion Sakhalin 2 project, forcing them to halve their respective holdings and give Gazprom, Russia’s natural gas monopoly, a majority stake. This instantly wiped out 2.5% of Shell’s global reserves. In June 2007, the private Russian-British consortium TNK-BP agreed under pressure to sell Gazprom its 63% stake in Rusia Petroleum, the company that held the license to develop the huge Kovykta gas field in eastern Siberia, and its 50% share in the East Siberian Gas Co.

This is how Gazprom became the world’s largest producer of natural gas, with rights to about one-quarter of the world’s known reserves. Gazprom provides the Russian government with control of one of the country’s most valuable resources. It also provides the Kremlin greater political leverage inside energy-poor Ukraine and other neighbors of Russia.

One of the key tenets of the Pickens Plan is that America’s continued dependency on foreign oil plays right into the hands of these governments, and as we all know many of them are not U.S. allies.

That’s what makes this country’s enormous natural gas reserves such a game-changer. Natural gas is cleaner. It’s cheaper. And, just as importantly, it’s OURS.

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