The energy transition light is shining on LNG

A look at what LNG is, how widely it’s traded, and which companies are at its epicenter

Earlier this week Shell, the global oil & gas behemoth, announced its ambition for the future.

CEO Wael Sawan was quoted in the company’s press release saying, “We want to become the world’s leading integrated gas and LNG business…”

Specifically, management called for “reinfor[cing] our leadership position in liquefied natural gas (LNG) by growing sales 4-5% per year through to 2030.” In the very next sentence, they say that top line oil & gas production will grow at 1% per year from now to 2030.

Putting those data points together, Shell wants to route more of its gas production into LNG commercial channels in the future. And there are a bunch of reasons why that makes sense for them.

LNG is near the center of the global energy conversation today.

Image created by Google Gemini via the prompt “a large LNG export terminal sitting on the coastline”

President Trump is pushing Japan, South Korea, and others to buy more US LNG. Discussion is growing around whether Europe can import LNG from Qatar, instead of from Russia, to fuel its economy. Woodside Energy in Australia just signed its first long-term sale and purchase agreement for LNG delivery into China.

In this post, we’ll start by describing how LNG is manufactured.

Then we’ll go through the US LNG footprint in detail, listing the existing facilities and their owners, along with historical export volumes through these facilities and upcoming LNG expansions and new projects between now and 2028.

We then introduce some global context, showing LNG export capacity by country, along with the country-specific export and import pictures.

We close with a discussion of what companies are behind the big push for LNG in the US, and how much capital these companies have deployed in this sector.

This post will set the stage for future work where we’ll do deep dives into specific LNG developers, looking at their histories, their financial performance, and their future investment expectations.

In the post right before this one, I wrote about how in the world of oil & gas, the pendulum is swinging from oil to gas.

LNG is an important reason for the bullishness around gas. Let’s explore the source of this excitement.