The Iran war has triggered the largest energy crisis in history, or so the conventional wisdom says. Epochal stuff — but only half-true, because oil is only half the story.

Thanks to the shale revolution and an enviable geological endowment, US and Canadian natural gas consumers are dodging the economic fallout of the Iran conflict. For America, long worried about its reliance on foreign fossil fuels, it’s an embarrassment of riches.

While European and Asian consumers are now paying north of $30 per million British thermal unit for their gas, US buyers pay around $3 per mBtu. Last week, US gas prices briefly touched a two-year low of $2.5 per mBut — in the middle of an energy crisis. Canadian costs are even lower, at about $1.5 per mBtu.

The price difference between gas in Europe and Asia versus North America, reaching now a ratio of 12 times, has never been wider; not during the 2022 gas shock following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, nor in 2011-2012 after the Fukushima nuclear accident, which forced Japan into gas to keep the lights on. In 2022, the Kremlin started using gas as a weapon against Europe. Tehran doesn’t have a similar tool at its disposal. Instead, the opposite is true: America is selling record volumes of liquefied natural gas, winning clients at the expense of Middle East nations hurt by the war, notably Qatar. The war is USA-made, but when it comes to natural gas, the price is paid in Europe and Asia.

It was slightly different in 2022. After Russia invaded Ukraine, US benchmark gas costs rose to nearly $10 per mBtu as American gas companies struggled to meet the boom in demand just after the Covid-19 pandemic, when they had cut drilling significantly. Now that production has caught up, the price difference with other regions has widened — and will only widen further if President Donald Trump ramps up the war in Iran after the US midterm elections on Nov. 3. Tehran has already warned it would retaliate by attacking Middle Eastern energy facilities.

Tehran is trying to impose intolerable economic pain on Trump via the energy market, and it has succeeded to a point with gasoline and diesel; but not with natural gas. So the average American family won’t face an unusually miserable winter. Gas is the fuel of choice for heating in the US. Roughly 47% households use it, while 42% use electricity to heat their homes. Heating oil, which has dominated headlines in the US Northeast because high prices are shaping a close election in Maine, only accounts for 4% of homes.

Since gas-fired power plants often set electricity prices, cheap gas also means, everything else equal, lower power costs.

Beyond the geopolitical game, the price of natural gas matters as global businesses must compete in what’s increasingly a very uneven energy market. Gas-intensive industries in Europe and Asia face an impossible cost battle.

Nearly two decades since the US shale revolution changed the American energy landscape, it’s easy to take cheap energy for granted. But there was a time, before 2007, when US gas was expensive. Since then and until last year, the abundance has saved the American economy as much as $4.3 trillion — emphasis on the word trillion — compared to the prices that European and Japanese consumers paid, according to a research paper by Lucas W. Davis at the Energy Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business. In the paper, published in May, Davis writes, “Access to low-price US natural gas has been particularly valuable during major supply shocks.”Quite!

The calculation doesn’t even include the benefit Canadian consumers enjoy, nor does it count 2026. Under current prices, and assuming they last until the end of the year, American consumers would enjoy another windfall. My back-of-the-envelope math points to savings in 2026 of at least $400 billion compared to what the US would have faced had its shale revolution not occurred.

Fortunately for Trump, the revolution did take place, several administrations before his arrival to the White House. For years, American wildcatters experimented with ways to crack a new source of gas: shale formations. The trial and error process paid off when they mixed horizontal drilling with hydraulic fracturing, or fracking — water, sand and chemicals were blasted deep underground to free oil from the hard-to-crack shale rock. What followed was a gusher. Over the last 20 years, American gas production has more than doubled.

Unlike the oil shale revolution, which had price benefits that were spread around the world, the gas bonanza has remained closer to home. That’s because gas is difficult to transport over long distances due to its enormous volume. To make shipping economical, gas first needs to be cooled to -162C (-260F), reducing its volume by about 600 times and transforming it into a liquid. Then it can be loaded into specialized ocean-going liquefied natural gas ships. The whole process is expensive, with each liquefaction facility costing, on average, as much as $10 billion to build.

Today, the US is exporting huge amounts of gas as LNG. But even that isn’t enough to fully connect its domestic market to the global one. As such, America is making a double profit: First, it enjoys ultra-low gas prices; second, it’s paid enormous sums for its exports. It’s a hugely profitable geopolitical landscape and Trump is aware. “The United States oil and gas business is making hundreds of billions of dollars," he said at a political rally in late October. For once, the US President was telling the truth. “I don't give a damn, I'm going to say it: We're making a freaking fortune,” he told his MAGA followers.

Left unsaid is what’s happening on the other side of the coin: Europe and Asia are paying the full cost of the energy crisis caused by the Iran war. Trump could have well added: And I don’t give a damn.