NextDecade Signs New Deals for Rio Grande Project

U.S. LNG development has seen a resurgence in the post-COVID world, with five projects with a combined 61.1 MMtpa (8.1 Bcf/d) of new LNG export capacity reaching a final investment decision (FID) in the past 18 months and one additional project closing in on that milestone. Five of these six projects are from the “Big Three” of U.S. LNG — Cheniere, Sempra and Venture Global — leading some to wonder if there’s room for anyone else. But while all three companies are big in U.S. LNG and have projects under development, only one is a behemoth. In today’s RBN blog, we continue our look at the pre-FID projects under development by the Big Three, focusing on the king of U.S. LNG, Cheniere.

There’s a tough race underway among U.S. LNG developers jockeying for position in the global LNG market. U.S. supply growth has spurred the development of more than two dozen LNG export projects, the bulk of them along the Texas/Louisiana Gulf Coast. But regulatory bottlenecks and deepening oversupply conditions in international markets are creating strong headwinds and slowing the momentum for some of these massive projects, making it harder and harder for them to reach the regulatory and commercial milestones they need to pass before they can progress to the construction phase. That said, several projects have eked out big wins in recent weeks, including Tellurian’s $7.5 billion memorandum of understanding with India’s Petronet LNG Ltd for its Driftwood LNG project, signed just this past weekend, and LNG Ltd.’s 2-MMtpa sales and purchase agreement for its Magnolia LNG, inked early last week. Today, we provide highlights of recent regulatory and commercial developments that are pacing the proposed export capacity additions.