WOODS: Natural gas is made from a mix of molecules, mostly methane. It's the fuel for the blue flames in your gas stovetop oven. It's also used to generate two-fifths of the electricity in the U.S.

HIRSCH: And if we go back to the early 1990s, natural gas was more of a bit player back then. There were fewer natural gas power plants, and the U.S. didn't export liquefied natural gas. Actually, that's not quite true. There was a small, little plant in Alaska, but they didn't export it at any great scale. It imported a lot instead.

WOODS: So at the time, a finance guy named Charif Souki saw opportunities in the growing market for natural gas. Along with trends like more coal power plants getting replaced by natural gas, he saw that the gas exploration technology was quickly improving. So Charif decided to get into the business, helping producers find more of the stuff in the U.S., and he quickly raised the capital.

CHARIF SOUKI: I've never found that a good idea has a difficult time raising money. If you have a difficult time raising money, maybe your idea is not so good.

HIRSCH: That seems pretty crucial to me, yes.

WOODS: Brutal but maybe true, yes.

HIRSCH: Charif set up his own gas exploration company, Cheniere Energy, but it faced a big barrier.

SOUKI: We couldn't find enough gas in the United States, so I wanted to import gas.

WOODS: So Charif started building docks in Louisiana, and he installed huge storage tanks to receive LNG. Now, natural gas is liquefied for shipping because you can store 600 times more of it in a given tank that way - some by cooling the gas to a very, very low temperature, minus 260 degrees Fahrenheit.

HIRSCH: Ooo (ph), cold.

WOODS: So that means on Charif's end, the receiving end, you do the reverse. It means he needed to build facilities to convert that liquefied natural gas from overseas into its normal gas form.

SOUKI: If you bring a very cold liquid, you have to warm it up. So you put it basically in warm water. It's not a very complicated process.

WOODS: Yeah, just give it a warm bath.

(LAUGHTER)

HIRSCH: But pretty soon Charif's plans were totally derailed. There was a transformation in the economics of natural gas, and it was due to two things - storms and fracking. Hurricanes like Hurricane Katrina spiked the price of gas super high, and that gave companies more incentive to perfect techniques to drill into shale rock underground, push through the pressurized liquid down there and suck out all the natural gas. The technology behind hydraulic fracking reached this critical level where it was becoming more and more commercially viable.

SOUKI: All of a sudden, we had the shale revolution in 2006, -7 and -8, and that changes - that changed things kind of dramatically.

WOODS: And in 2009, Charif gets a call. It's another natural gas titan, a guy by the name of Aubrey McClendon.

SOUKI: Called me and said, Charif, can you go in the other direction? We know you're building this plant to receive natural gas in the United States. Can you now export it? So we went from thinking that we were going to be import-dependent to all of a sudden maybe it would make sense to export it.

WOODS: Now, this was arguably a hunch at the time. It wasn't yet proven that these natural gas reserves would keep growing and growing. But Charif decided to take the advice and abruptly shift course. And instead of being an importer of natural gas, Charif's company would now export it. So that meant all those warm baths now needed to be replaced by refrigerators.

HIRSCH: (Laughter) Where's a super-cooled freezer when you need one?

SOUKI: We had already built the infrastructure to import, so we had the marine facilities, and we had the tanks. But we had no one I needed to build the refrigerator, and compared to the warm water, it's a 10-X budget.

HIRSCH: And even Charif, whose superpower is raising cash, find this kind of daunting.

SOUKI: It's not that hard to raise $1 billion. It's much harder to raise $15 billion. You have to convince more people.

WOODS: It's a lot of wining and dining and phone calls and faxes and emails.

SOUKI: Yeah, thank God, not wining and dining because I try to stay in reasonably good health, and that wouldn't have happened if I had to wine and dine people.

WOODS: Eventually Charif secured the money and started building export facilities. More and more gas reserves in the U.S. were found in the meantime. Charif's company secured contracts for overseas buyers. You know, this guy seemed unstoppable. By 2013, he was the highest-paid CEO in the U.S., and this is before the first shipment of natural gas had even left the port.

HIRSCH: But then Charif ran into something that changed everything - or someone, one of Cheniere Energy's investors, Carl Icahn, who took issue with this plan. Now, Icahn is basically a financial deity. He's this celebrity-level investor who's kind of used to getting his own way.

WOODS: Charif says that his ambitions for investing in all kinds of new plans was being stymied. His version of events is that Carl Icahn had him fired for this.

SOUKI: So he did not like to be contradicted, so he arranged to have me fired.

WOODS: Carl Icahn's version of events is that Charif was overpaid, and he had been threatening the board with resignation unless he got paid more. In any case, Charif was out by late 2015. He had gone from being a hydrocarbon prince to essentially unemployed overnight. Now, financially, Charif was OK, of course. He'd been paid out with a lot of money and equity in the company, but to be kicked out of the company he'd put his life into, I mean, this was a body blow.

HIRSCH: Yeah. And a few months later, he went to a conference for the natural gas industry. And at one presentation, one of the executives who'd replaced him with his company got on stage and spoke in front of a video. It showed a ship leaving a Louisiana terminal on its way to Brazil. The ship was the scale of a cruise ship but storing huge amounts of liquefied natural gas. It was Charif's old company's first LNG shipment abroad.

WOODS: How did it feel?

SOUKI: Strange because I was no longer there - so I'd worked very hard for a very long time to make that happen, and then I wasn't invited to the inauguration.

HIRSCH: And this was a huge first for America, right? This was the moment the U.S. went from importing LNG to becoming a major LNG exporter, and volumes since then have just grown and grown until last year when the U.S. started beating Australia and Qatar to be the biggest LNG exporter in the world. Now, the numbers bounce around month to month, but based on projections, the U.S. position is only growing.

WOODS: All of this is vindication for Charif, who has stayed in the natural gas industry with a new company. Now, of course, natural gas is a fossil fuel.