VANCOUVER — Back in May, when Christy Clark’s Liberals won a commanding mandate in the B.C. provincial elections, the premier drove home one point — the election was won on the economy.

Last week came further proof Clark’s determination to hitch a key part of that plan to the Asia wagon.

Clark announced she is making her fourth trade mission to Asia since taking office two years ago, a 13-day sojourn that will take her and a number of high-ranking government and business officials through China, Japan and South Korea.

While previous trips put the focus on forestry and educational exchanges, the key issue of this particular was spelt out clearly in the provincial government’s statement: natural gas.

B.C.’s budget has already been hit repeatedly and heavily by falling natural gas prices in recent years; that has already been discussed at length in the public forum. But in the budget announcement back in June, Finance Minister Mike de Jong also made clear that natural gas presented a path to a balanced budget — in the form to enticing buyers from Asia.

According to the budget plan, liquefied natural gas exports from the Northwest represent a trillion-dollar business opportunity (and a source of up to 100,000 new jobs in the province). But critics noted there were few details in the LNG plan, including who will invest to build export plants in B.C.

That’s where the Asia trade mission, scheduled to begin on Nov. 21, comes in. The trip will possibly provide the first details of the path envisioned by de Jong and B.C. officials.

The key meeting of the trip will most likely be the Canada-Korea Natural Gas Forum in Seoul on Dec. 1, where high-level officials from both sides will enter into discussions of LNG investment in B.C. A similar meeting was held in Vancouver last year.

Looking strictly at the natural gas market in South Korea, Japan and China, the provincial government’s reasoning for targeting the region is sound. The three East Asian nations are all among the word’s leaders in natural gas import, with LNG particularly in demand in Japan and South Korea (where a lack of domestic energy resources forces the countries to depend heavily on imports).

Japan, with US$60 billion in LNG imports last year, is the world’s largest LNG importer (importing roughly a third of the world’s current market supply). That number is likely to continue to rise: The recent troubles at the Fukushima nuclear plant (and, more importantly, Tokyo Electric Co.’s inability to contain the leaking of contaminated water from the core) have soured public opinion on nuclear power.

At the same time, the country’s economic engine has been jolted back to life by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s economic plan, with stimulus and quantitative easing driving stock markets to highs rarely seen in recent years. With consumer confidence quickly rising, energy consumption may see a spike — and LNG may be poised to satisfy a demand that can no longer look to nuclear sources.