By Richard Martin, Editor-At-Large

Displaying its usual talent for crying wolf, the Colorado natural gas industry last week sounded the alarm about the new deal for gas imports from Russia. Russian gas giant Gazprom has signed a deal with Shell Oil that will bring liquefied natural gas (LNG) from the Russian processing facility at Sakhalin, on the Pacific Coast, to Baja Mexico and thence to the western U.S. Sakhalin Energy, the exporting company, is co-owned by Shell and Gazprom.

“This deal will enable Gazprom to begin shipment of LNG supplies from Sakhalin II to the United States, the world’s largest gas market, and other markets of the Pacific Basin, ” Gazprom chairman Alexey Miller said in a statement.

This arrangement “makes the United States even more dependent on foreign energy,” according to John Harpole, a director of the Independent Petroleum Association of Mountain States, as reported in the Grand Junction Sentinel, “while jeopardizing some of the 150,000 exploration and development jobs in the Rockies.”

Unsurprisingly, the full situation is more complex. Many exploration and development jobs in the Rockies have already disappeared: Williams Production, for example, has scaled back its Western Slope activities by 60 percent in the current downturn, and Colorado’s overall rig count is down 55 percent — a slowdown that has nothing to do with Russian imports.

Still, the natural gas boom on the Western Slope has not fizzled entirely. Applications for new drilling permits are running about the same as 2007 levels, partly driven by impending new oil-and-gas regulations, since permits granted before the rules take effect will be grandfathered under the previous, less stringent regime), and “Operators are focusing on infrastructure development so they will be ready to ramp up drilling when the price of natural gas recovers,” according to a quarterly industry report to Garfield County commissioners, as reported in the Aspen Times .

The larger picture is that natural gas is becoming a globalized commodity, like oil. For many years gas was largely consumed within the borders of the country where it was produced, but the spread of new processing and transport technology, and the replacement of coal with gas as the preferred fuel for conventional power generation in many countries, has created a world LNG market.

In environmental terms that’s a questionable tradeoff: transporting gas in supertankers does little to reduce overall carbon output. In diplomatic terms it’s been an unquestioned boost for post-Soviet Russia. Vladimir Putin has repeatedly demonstrated, particularly in his relations with neighboring Ukraine, that he’s unhesitant to use Russian gas exports as a foreign-policy cudgel. In that sense, the objections of groups like IPAMS to the start of U.S. imports of Russian LNG (the Shell deal calls for 20 million tons of LNG to be transported over 20 years to these shores) are not so far-fetched. “Gas industry executives expect that liquefied gas imports into the United States will at least triple in the second half of this year,” reports The New York Times. Even at that level, the imports are negligible, though: Chris Theal, managing director of institutional equity research at Tristone Capital Inc., told Canada’s Financial Post that Russian imports will be “less than 0.5%” of total U.S. demand.

And stopping the globalization of gas is, at this point, a fool’s mission. At the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s annual conference last week, analysts said that prices will remain depressed, at around $4-$6 per 1000 cubic feet, for the foreseeable future. And new export plants are being built around the globe by producers including not only Russia but Qatar, Indonesia and Yemen.

Ultimately that will be good for Western Slope natural gas producers, as globalization opens up new markets and creates a worldwide price mechanism. Protectionism is hardly ever effective in the long run. Demand will also grow as LNG is tapped to back up intermittent, renewable power sources such as wind and solar. That doesn’t mean the industry will stop complaining every step of the way.