In 1969 in Nikiski, a small community in southern Alaska, a team of gas industry pioneers set in motion something that would reshape the global energy landscape. They shipped the United States’ first liquefied natural gas across the Pacific Ocean to Japan.

Over the next five decades, similar projects proliferated across the United States and overseas. Liquefied natural gas, or L.N.G., has become a $130 billion global market. The United States is the largest supplier, and nations in Asia, including Japan, are its primary consumers.

In Nikiski, 10 years before that first shipment to Japan, explorers seeking oil in the nearby Cook Inlet Basin unearthed substantial reserves of natural gas. The challenge was whom to sell it to because the sparsely populated region was not a viable market.

The American companies Phillips Petroleum and Marathon Oil, key players in the area’s gas discoveries, turned their focus to Japan. Just an eight-day voyage 3,800 miles across the Pacific from Nikiski, Japan was undergoing rapid economic expansion and desperately needed energy, yet it lacked domestic supplies of oil, coal and gas.

In the 1960s, the Japanese utilities Tokyo Gas and Tokyo Electric Power deliberated a proposal to import gas, cooled to a liquid at minus 260 degrees Fahrenheit, from Nikiski. While a nascent L.N.G. trade existed at the time, the concept of transporting vast quantities of liquefied gas from a distant Alaskan outpost to Asia was unprecedented.

The Japanese companies decided to proceed, and in 1967 construction began on a liquefaction facility and export terminal in Nikiski.