First comes expatriation of U.S. natural gas resources, then comes export. Chesapeake Energy Corp.'s news in the fall of 2008 of its joint venture with Norway's Statoil ASA in the Oklahoma City-based E&P's Marcellus shale acreage set off a series of similar JVs among U.S. gas-reserve owners and non-U.S. E&Ps, while Washington was silent on the matter.

Since then, JV partners have included Japan's Mitsui & Co. Ltd. and Sumitomo Corp., India's Reliance Industries Ltd., Italy's ENI, France's Total SA, the U.K.'s BP Plc and BG Group, and Canada's Talisman Energy Inc. and Enerplus.

The news in 2008 also initiated talk of the potential for exporting U.S. gas, particularly to Europe, which is working to shore up non-Russian sources to assure industry and voters of uninterrupted supply. Statoil's contract for LNG import capacity at Dominion Resources Inc.'s Cove Point, Maryland, facility suggested to some that burgeoning U.S. gas output from the nearby Marcellus could result in reversing that facility to export instead.

Statoil mentioned the Maryland facility in its press release about the Marcellus deal, but the mention was related to how the Marcellus JV provides it with further firm access to physical product as it grows its U.S. gas-trading business, and supplements its access to physical supply from its Gulf of Mexico production.

A headline in the past few weeks has re-initiated speculation on the potential to begin export of meaningful amounts of U.S. gas production, which is currently limited to the sale of some stranded Alaskan production to Japan and to some benign pipeline shipments to Canada and Mexico. In September, Cheniere Energy Partners LP won Department of Energy approval of exporting U.S. gas from its Sabine Pass, Louisiana, receiving terminal, which opened in 2008 as LNG shipments were fetching better prices at ports outside North America.

But the approval of Cheniere's application is of export to U.S. Free Trade Agreement countries. And, those on the list—Australia, Bahrain, Singapore, Honduras and Morocco, to name a few—do not need large amounts of gas from the U.S. currently, either because they have plenty, they don't use very much gas or there are nearer, competitively priced markets. The more critical approval Cheniere needs now is of exporting up to 16 million metric tons of LNG per year—or more than 2 billion cubic feet per day—for 20 years to any country with which trade is not prohibited by the U.S.

A green light would set precedent to allow other LNG facilities to receive similar treatment. It begs the question: If the U.S. will allow a foreign company to own U.S. gas reserves, how could it prohibit it from monetizing it to its fullest potential? In theory, the U.S. may compete globally for its own natural gas in the future. While it is dependent on foreign oil, it may assume an export-or-pay posture in the world's gas markets.

This question may be a source of upset in Washington already, but it is still quiet on the matter, further emphasizing that federal law- and policy-makers have no grasp of what to do with America's indigenous, abundant, clean-burning, high-Btu natural resources.

And then there is the inevitable matter of transfer of ownership. If CNOOC Ltd. can own 33% of Chesapeake's interest in its Eagle Ford play, would it have the right to win a bid for the entire company in the future, as Statoil, Total and BP could? And, if ownership of physical U.S. gas assets aids in Statoil's trading business, Russia's Gazprom could contend the same, as it has a fairly new U.S. trading unit based in Houston.

The U.S. gas landscape in 2015 could be remarkably different, both in marketing and ownership. A U.S. energy investment banker warns, "Raids don't happen among U.S. E&Ps, generally, because it's going to be awkward at the golf course on Sunday. However, participants in the global energy market aren't going to be at the golf course on Sunday and their overriding mission is to capture barrels…NOCs (national oil companies), generally speaking, don't play by the same rules that a lot of the rest of us do.

"I'm not saying we're going to see a wave of hostile activity, but we're sort of starting to see it…For every one of these JVs, there are 25 other guys who didn't get the deal done and the money's still out there."

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