When Wolfgang Eder
and his team started looking around for a site for a new plant
for Voestalpine, the Austrian steelmaker he heads,
they had 17 sites in eight countries on their list.
This month, after more than a year of looking, they settled
on the U.S. state of Texas, after a boom in the production of
natural gas from shale extraction brought gas prices down to
just a quarter of what companies paid in Europe.