‘This used to be a beautiful place’: how the US became the world’s biggest fossil fuel state

No country has ever in history produced as much oil and gas as the US does now and Louisiana is ground zero

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To witness how the United States has become the world's unchallenged oil and gas behemoth is to contemplate the scene from John Allaire's home, situated on a small spit of coastal land on the fraying, pancake-flat western flank of Louisiana.

Allaire's looming neighbor, barely a mile east across a ship channel that has been pushed into the Gulf of Mexico, is a hulking liquified natural gas (or LNG) plant, served by leviathan ships shuttling its chilled cargo overseas. Another such terminal lies a few miles to the west, yet another to the north. The theme continues even in Allaire's seaward vista - alongside a boneyard of old oil rigs, a new floating offshore LNG platform is in the works.