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🚢 Russia has long sought to increase its share of the global LNG market, but the war and the subsequent sharp drop in pipeline gas Europe have reinforced the importance of these ambitions
Moscow wants to expand LNG output three-fold by 2030
Enter Arctic LNG 2, a massive complex which would boost Russia’s LNG exports by 60%
The primary mission was to develop new LNG customers in East Asia by sending fuel across the Northern Sea Route, using enormous icebreaker vessels to traverse the frozen waters
The Gulf nation of Qatar is setting itself up to control about a quarter of all liquefied natural gas production by the end of the decade -- and with it, a growing share of the world's wealth and influence
Qatar unveiled last week plans to boost LNG export capacity another 13% on top of previously announced projects, together lifting production from 77 million tons/year to 142 million tons by 2030
This will make the rich nation (with a population of just 2.7 million) much richer
So how did Qatar even get here?
Time for a (simplified) history lesson…
Fifty years ago, Qatar was largely seen as a fossil-fuel backwater compared with its Persian Gulf neighbors Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the UAE
This is the story of how the US became the world's biggest exporter of liquefied natural gas in less than a decade, drastically rewriting global energy trade
Thread below 🧵👇
The world's first overseas LNG shipment was exported from Louisiana to the UK on the Methane Pioneer over 60 years ago
The US pioneered the large-scale process to chill natural gas to -256F, transforming it into a liquid. Liquefying gas makes the fuel occupy 600-times less space
Phillips developed the first ever US LNG export plant in Alaska in the 1960s
The project was born from a sales agreement with Japan, which were eager to begin importing natural gas to help ease air pollution issues in Japan
This enormous buildout of LNG export capacity from Qatar to the US will cement the role of natural gas in energy transition
Much of this new LNG supply will go to China, but even the EU has agreed to buy shipments past 2050, despite ambitious green goals
The US has more LNG export capacity planned than any nation 🇺🇸
Not all of this will be built, but the current slate of projects will cement the US as the world's top supplier of LNG (which is wild because the US only began exporting shale gas as LNG in 2016...)