With help from Ben Lefebvre, Eric Wolff and Darius Dixon

Welcome back to our pop-up newsletter on the World Gas Conference in Washington, where the Asian gas heavyweights took to the stage. Let’s jump in:

WAR AGAINST COAL, BATTLEFIELD ASIA: When it comes to demand for liquefied natural gas, Asia has far and away the biggest appetite, and it’s likely to stay that way even as other markets around the world develop. The top five consumers — Japan, South Korea, China, India and Taiwan — swallowed up two-thirds of LNG shipments last year, and prices there are attractive enough to keep sellers lining up. But Asian energy company executives reminded the world today that as much as they love LNG, coal will have a significant presence in the region for a long time.

“Coal is the dominant energy source in China’s energy structure,” Beijing Gas Chairwoman Yalan Li told the audience this morning, noting that the fuel still constitutes 60 percent of the country’s energy mix. And even though the government is pushing to shrink that hold and gas and renewables will eat away at coal’s market share, they won’t completely erase it, she said.

Hendrik Gordenker, chairman of Japanese energy trading giant JERA, told the crowd that Tokyo’s current policy is for a quarter of the country’s energy to come from coal, a plan that would require companies to build new coal-fired plants to replace aging ones. That would also probably toss out any possibility of the county meeting its greenhouse gas emissions targets under the 2015 Paris agreement.

And the economy of Indonesia, Asia’s No. 2 LNG producer, still also depends on exporting coal to the tune of about 300 million metric tons a year, some of it to Japan, said Ignasius Jonan, the country’s minister of energy and mineral resources. “About 55 to 60 percent of our power mix is coal,” Jonan said. “Hopefully, we can reduce use of coal to slightly less than 50 percent” in the next decade. “But it’s still there.”

U.S. LNG mmmmmaybe: Li hedged on whether the company will buy more LNG from the U.S. China’s demand for natural gas is expected to grow, with forecasts calling for the country to be the second-largest gas consumer by 2024. But so far, China’s government prefers to increase supply by digging its own wells at home and bringing in gas from abroad via pipeline, including a major one that’s scheduled to start deliveries from Russia next year. Li said whether the country would increase imports from the U.S. was a “hard question” — though it essentially would depend on how cheap the shipments would be. “Of course we need more LNG, and we continue to diversify our portfolio,” she told the audience. “But price plays a big role. We hope if the LNG import price will be more reasonable, it will come from America.”

PUMP THE BRAKES: For all the natural gas being pumped out of fields in places like Texas and Louisiana, U.S. supplies are still too far from the world’s biggest LNG customers to justify building many more export plants, said Jim Muschalik, president of ExxonMobil’s LNG market development.

It may be that Exxon is “talking its book” (as they say in the industry) and trying to scare off competitors, since it’s still considering turning the Golden Pass LNG plant in Louisiana that it runs with Qatar Petroleum into an export project. But Muschalik said that for all the talk of another wave of U.S. LNG investment, room doesn’t exist for all the companies that have already filed export applications with the federal government. And one of the biggest factors is the sheer distance between the Gulf Coast and markets in Asia, which pushes up costs for sellers.

“I agree there’s a gas renaissance with production and the outlook is very robust in the U.S.,” Muschalik said. “But when we look around the world ... our view is that not all the projects in the U.S. Gulf Coast will be built. They won’t be able to compete. They’re far from the primary markets, and there are opportunities that will serve those markets that are closer.”

COUNTERPOINT: Jason Bordoff, the founding director at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, said the massive amount of gas production that will flood the market means companies will need new U.S. export facilities to sell off the extra volume. “If you look at the amount of just associated gas that is going to be coming out of the Permian once some of these pipeline bottlenecks are resolved, that’s a huge amount of gas. We need to be able to put it on the water and access the global market,” he said.

On the other hand, that business runs the risk of being derailed if the Trump administration isn’t careful in stirring up a backlash against free trade. “LNG was obviously excluded from China’s threatened retaliatory tariffs, but a trade war would probably not be good for trade in global energy, not to mention the cost of steel and other things to build projects,” he said.

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BENNET HAMMERS ADMINISTRATION FOR LIVING IN MAKE-BELIEVE: Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado used his brief conference appearance to slam the Trump administration for its disregard of climate science.

“In Washington, we have an energy policy based not on the world as it is, but in the world the present administration imagines, where climate change is not the overwhelming scientific consensus, but a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese,” he said. “Where renewable energy is not a tremendous economic opportunity but a Bolshevik pipe dream of some kind, or even a threat to other energy sources. The facts tell us otherwise.”

While the hallways and conference rooms are mostly filled with people brimming with optimism about the opportunities for the gas business, one cybersecurity expert warned of dark clouds if the industry doesn’t get its act together to ward off digital threats. “There won’t really be cybersecurity to the level we want it without some kind of big government intervention. And there won’t be big government intervention, from the conversations I’ve heard, without some kind of cyber 9/11,” David Blanco, SCADA security director at Autosol, told a panel discussion today. “It would have to be mandatory to actually be enforced … and it will have to be an event where lives are lost for any kind of regulation to come about from it.”

He also didn’t see how a company could evade responsibility if such a disaster occurred because cyber issues are such a high-profile threat. “I think it’s hard to argue in this environment that any company is going to be surprised by a hack attack,” Blanco said. Voluntary pipeline cyber standards that fall under the jurisdiction of the Transportation Security Administration may be too flexible. “The voluntary standards let each company fit the policy that best fits them.”