Qatargas

Among the 21 countries able to liquefy methane and export LNG, Australia, Qatar, and the U.S. are the hands-down leaders, holding more than half the world’s liquefaction capacity among them. For now, Australia holds the top position but its capacity buildout is all but complete. While a number of liquefaction projects are planned Down Under, only one has reached the final investment decision (FID) stage in 2021, and it’s relatively small. Future growth seems much more likely to come from the two other big guns. Developers in the U.S. are cautiously thawing the plans for LNG projects they put on ice in mid-2020, when global natural gas prices slumped along with economies during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. And in February, Qatar, which was runner-up to Australian capacity until it slipped to third place due to recent U.S. additions, took FID on the first of two supersized projects to expand its LNG capacity. In today’s RBN blog, we discuss Qatar’s expansion plans and how they relate to developments elsewhere.

It’s crunch time in the race to advance the next-round of liquefaction/LNG export projects along the U.S. Gulf Coast to a Final Investment Decision (FID). And if we’re to assume that only a small number of these multibillion-dollar projects will get their financial go-aheads, it would seem eminently reasonable to put a win-place-or-show bet on a joint venture that includes the world’s leading LNG producer (by far) and one of the largest U.S. natural gas producers — oh, and the partners have very fat wallets too. Size and money aren’t everything, of course, but as we discuss in today’s blog, the team behind the Golden Pass LNG project plans to build its liquefaction trains at the site of an existing LNG import terminal with strong interconnections with coastal pipelines already in place.