Overview of the LNG World Indusry
Authors: True Warren R. 
Published: October 2008

Since 1995, the global LNG industry has mounted a recovery of vitality and energy few in the 1980s thought likely. Improvements in technology that lowered its incremental production, transportation, and regasification costs combined with resurgence in worldwide natural gas demand and price to force LNG into the energy limelight as never before. This paper presents an overview of global LNG capacities—production, shipping, and regasification—as of Jan. 1, 2008. It will also review world LNG markets, look at individual regions and projects, and conclude with a view of near and mid-term industry issues.

1. Introduction

The nature of natural gas as a fuel restricted it to regional use throughout most of the last half of the 20th Century. Limited means of moving gas conspired with small and scattered world markets to keep the fuel cheap and often, where produced, flared as a nuisance. Even with advent of larger and longer regional, and sometimes interregional pipelines, natural gas use remained geographically constrained. Mostly in Asia and mainly due to steady growth of Japanese and Korean demand did LNG grow over the last 30 years of the 20th Century.

By the end of the 20th Century, however, it had become clear to the global natural gas industry that the technical means for moving natural gas in its cryogenic state—liquefied, that is—held the potential for circumventing regional and global geographic barriers. Demand in the 1990s, pushed by public recognition of gas as a more environmentally benign fuel than oil or coal, helped force up the incremental value of natural gas (per million cubic feet/day, MMcfd; or million cubic meters).

These two forces—demand and price—then combined to revive the LNG industry outside Asia from the stagnation it had largely fallen into in the late 1980s after a brief surge in the 1970s. By the late 1990s, moving supplies of natural gas as LNG from such formerly stranded areas as off Western Australia, Qatar, and West Africa to markets many miles distant over oceans and seas became not only possible but also economical. By the first decade of the 21st Century, nations with large reserves of natural gas were pushing to develop liquefaction projects, setting off waves of shipbuilding and of plans for regasification projects in market areas.

This paper presents an overview of global LNG capacities—production, transportation, and regasification—as of Jan. 1, 2008. It will also review world LNG markets, look at individual regions and projects, and conclude with a view of industry issues.

2. Markets

The promise of global LNG is the promise of minimal or no market-specific or geographic barriers to trade, a vision that is unlikely ever to be realized.

From the beginning, long-term contracts of generally 20 years dominated and continue to characterize most commercial arrangements. But pricing references differ for Asia-Pacific, Europe, and North America. Each of these regional markets has its own pricing mechanism that reflects and reinforces geographic barriers among them. These commercial differences combined with regional concentrations of end users and with the nature of natural gas will likely prevent the kind of global fungibility found in crude oil and its products.