Occupy Howard Weil began the long wind-down March 28 as most of the 600 institutional investors started the journey home, or stayed in bed a little longer to facilitate dissipation of the numbing fog that sets in from long days of presentations and management one-on-ones sandwiched between two hard nights of eating, imbibing, and energy-focused jocularity.

Occupy Howard Weil?

The 40th edition of the legendary New Orleans energy conference vaguely resembled a variation on the youth occupy movement—if youth had gray hair and a preference for Jos. A Banks garb. These were, to quote a fellow journalist, the One-on-One Percenters.

Main conference themes from the 27 presentations your exhausted correspondent witnessed included operators discussing “running room” (curiously “extreme” running room in one case) or portfolio approaches to energy development.

Running room is shorthand for no major new discoveries and a half-decade, or more, of sizeable investment to develop existing inventories. And that’s one of the important takeaways for those following today’s oil and gas industry. Infrastructure, resource development, and payout will unfold over the remaining decade. If instant gratification is your motivation in energy, you’ll love the hype, but likely be disappointed at the pacing.

On the services side, pressure pumping issues re-surfaced with Jaws-like ferocity early in the conference thanks to statements of a weakening North American market from Schlumberger and a sobering presentation from Baker Hughes just when some investors thought it was safe to get back into the oil services waters. In fact investor reticence on pressure pumping began to taint the land drillers who were last year’s conference darlings.

Not that it mattered. Those few investors willing to look at services were enamored instead with the rising tide of fortune for the offshore drillers.

On the E&P side, if you had a Permian Basin story, you had a crowd. So, repeat after me: Permian, Eagle Ford and Bakken. That, in a nutshell, was the bumper sticker take-away from this year’s gathering. The downstream sector also looks intriguing, thanks to greater anticipated finished product exports.

But the basic narrative is that once the hype is set aside, it’s going to be a long slog in energy. Frankly, investors—and industry—are more optimistic on the timing of progress than the facts merit. Changes going forward involve incrementalism rather than disruptive, step-level breakthroughs.

Take LNG. If you are like most, you expect U.S. producers will begin exporting LNG derived from $2.50 gas to Asian markets paying $17 on a Brent-indexed basis as early as 2015. It’s a compelling story.

However, Cheniere Energy CEO Charif Souki unceremoniously punctured that myth during his March 27th luncheon presentation to a partially incredulous audience.

“We have an export license that will allow us to spend $10 billion to build a very complicated infrastructure on top of the infrastructure we already have. This doesn’t happen overnight,” Souki said. “With the permitting and with the construction, it is a minimum of six or seven years before you can do anything about it. We’ve been at it for three years. We are on the verge of getting our permits. The first gas will be delivered by 2016. To get to the point of capacity that we can export—a little more than 2 Bcfd—it will be 2018. When people start talking about how much we’re going to export in the next five years, the answer is: ‘nothing’.”

And, there is little opportunity for anyone else to step up in the interim.

“For other people to do the same thing, it will be in the 2018 to 2020 time frame at the earliest—if they start tomorrow and get serious about getting the permits which, at the moment, nobody has done,” Souki said.

In fact, Cheniere is just now starting on the funding to build the $10-billion liquefaction facility at Sabine Pass.

Furthermore, Souki noted expectations that Cheniere would be delivering LNG to Europe or Asia were “nonsense.” Cheniere’s plans call for liquefaction of natural gas into LNG and making it available at the Cheniere Sabine Pass facility for roughly $3 per Mcf in liquefaction costs plus the price of natural gas as the feedstock. Right now that price all in is roughly $5.50 per Mcf, though subject to change.

In other words, Cheniere will provide the liquefaction only. It will be up to industry to get the product to other markets. As for those markets, Souki explained that neither Asia nor Europe were the most likely targets for U.S.-produced LNG.

“Everyone talks about Asia being the best market, [but] that is not true,” Souki explained. “The best market is right here in the Americas because they are burning diesel and fuel to generate power for electricity. So their cost is $17 or $18 compared to picking it up here for $5.50 and delivering it to their own market, whether it is in Puerto Rico or Brazil.”

In fact, Souki argued that best market near term for LNG was in substitution for oil products.

Thus, U.S. export LNG has now become a proxy for the domestic oil and gas market. So, an extended low-gas price environment anyone? It’s surely looking that way. Investors may have left Occupy Howard Weil this year expecting the good times to roll, but it’s a slow train coming round the bend.