I hope this isn’t too far into the weeds for our readers, though if it is, just understand you might not be the core audience for this post. I’m actually talking to the big shots at the Louisiana state capitol and at the U.S. Capitol here.

But for everybody’s benefit, let’s start with a bunch of Canadian leftists doing the things Canadian leftists have come to do.

There is a company called Aethon Energy which has its headquarters in Dallas. Essentially, it’s a private investment firm, but it’s also an owner-operator of a lot of oil and gas assets across the country – particularly in Wyoming, Texas and Louisiana and especially in the Haynesville Shale in the northwestern part of Louisiana.

Aethon was founded by Albert Huddleston in 1990. Gordon Huddleston is the current CEO. The Huddlestons are, essentially, a branch of the Hunt family – the Hunts own the Kansas City Chiefs and they’re as big in oil and gas as anybody.

And Aethon is the largest producer of natural gas in the Haynesville Shale. Aethon produces some 2.1 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day.

So that’s who Aethon is.

The Huddlestons own 40 percent of Aethon. Another 40 percent is owned by the Ontario Teachers’ Union through their retirement fund. Other private equity investors had the other 20 percent.

And the Ontario Teachers’ Union’s retirement fund has naturally gone utterly woke and decided they would divest themselves of all fossil fuels.

Having somebody trying to dump 40 percent of your company when you aren’t a publicly-traded firm is a massive problem. It’s the kind of thing that should never, ever happen when it’s based on stupid leftist politics. Frankly, it wouldn’t bother us if the Ontario Teachers’ Union was barred from investing in the United States as punishment for this, though that’s hardly a free market position to take.

And when the woke Canadian teachers bailed, it spooked the other investors. That put Aethon into a really bad position. And finding somebody with both the capital and the technical wherewithal to operate a company like a natural gas producer, much less wanting to do so, is exceedingly difficult.

But the Huddlestons found a buyer anyway, and while on its face you might question the deal, when you think about it, it’s great business.

The buyer is Mitsubishi. The deal is supposed to close soon, and it’s a $5.2 billion transaction. There is an option built in for the Huddlestons to buy back 25 percent of the company. Gordon Huddleston stays the CEO; the operators all keep their jobs.

Do we want a foreign company to own the largest natural gas producer in Louisiana? In this case, yes.

Bear in mind that one of the biggest reasons the Haynesville Shale boom went bust a decade or so ago was that there wasn’t a ready buyer for all the natural gas being produced in the northwest corner of our state. There are lots of people out there who’d like to buy natural gas, but things tend to get complicated very quickly when it comes to fossil fuels. And in all of these other First World Western countries, we’ve gone through 25 years of stupid politicians trying to move us away from oil and gas.

When there is no good alternative to either. And when natural gas is the cleanest-burning fossil fuel there is.

But we’ve now got a huge amount of infrastructure which has been built here in Louisiana so that we can export natural gas across the globe. Those giant LNG export terminals going up in Lake Charles are basically a straight shot down a pipeline from the wells in Caddo, Bossier and DeSoto Parishes, and those fat tanker ships sidling up to the dock can take it anywhere.

But here’s where it gets a little complicated, because the word has been that Louisiana has to build these carbon-capture projects in order to offset the emissions that natural gas production and liquefaction create – because all of the European countries, for example, want to be “net-zero” on carbon, and that means they can’t buy natural gas from us unless they know that the gas was produced and transported in a carbon-neutral fashion.

All of which is beyond idiotic when you consider the Euros buy most of their natural gas from Russia, and how “climate-friendly” do you think the Russians are? Hell, if anybody wants global warming it’s the frozen Russians.

Guess who doesn’t give a single fig about net-zero or carbon-neutral natural gas exports? Japan. And particularly Japan now that they’ve got a brand-new, utterly non-woke government which just got elected a little while ago.

Japan is utterly energy-starved, especially after being spooked by what happened in Fukushima and being a little bit nervous about nuclear energy. Natural gas is a perfect solution for them.

And Japan’s economy is gigantic. They can buy pretty much everything we can pump out of the ground and then some. A better customer you cannot find.

The Japanese have descended on the Haynesville shale in a major way. From the April report by Shale Experts…

They’re already rocking the Haynesville Shale and giving northwest Louisiana a new lease on economic life, and now here comes the Aethon deal.

We’re looking at this as a very big transaction which could lock Louisiana’s natural gas industry in on the demand side for decades and insure lots of great-paying jobs. And it will create a situation making this carbon-capture debate which has torn us apart for a couple of years utterly obsolete. Nobody is going to be pushing carbon capture when there is no economic justification for doing it.

There are going to be some regulatory hurdles to overcome before this deal closes. But having Louisiana’s largest natural gas producer being owned by Japanese capitalists instead of Canadian commies is a major win which can reap benefits for the state for a very long time. Our folks need to make sure this deal isn’t killed by bureaucrats, because if it is, we could have a major employer in the state come apart based on predatory woke politics – and who knows who’d be scavenging for the pieces of that company.

Let’s get this done.