As delegates at the annual UN climate talks in Dubai celebrated last month’s historic deal to move away from fossil fuels, tens of thousands of laborers just across the Persian Gulf in Qatar were chasing a different goal: make the world’s largest natural-gas export facility even bigger.
At a time when some see oil demand nearing its peak and coal is likely to face a slow but steady decline, the energy sector is betting hundreds of billions of dollars that the third leading fossil fuel — natural gas — has a place in the world’s energy mix through at least 2050. That lifespan hinges on one last torrent of investment into the massive terminals that liquefy and export super-chilled liquefied natural gas, or LNG, for countries not yet ready or able to make the transition to renewables.
Five US sites teem with their own crews working to conjure titanic industrial structures from America’s Gulf Coast. Two of the US projects aim to come online as soon as this year, kickstarting what may be the world’s final wave of fossil-fuel megaprojects.
Tallying just the ones that have broken ground, more than 200 million tons of new natural gas export capacity will start up in roughly the next five years, according to BloombergNEF. If additional early-stage projects still awaiting final investment decisions move forward, too, more than 300 million tons of new LNG capacity could come online by 2030, according to Baker Hughes Co. That’s a roughly 70% spike from today, adding enough annual gas capacity to power half a billion homes and ensuring natural gas’s relevance — and emissions — for decades to come.
This begins “the third big wave in LNG,” said Anne-Sophie Corbeau, a global research scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. “By 2028, when everything is basically built, we end up with a hell of a lot of LNG in the US and a hell of lot of LNG in Qatar.”
In short, it took 60 years for the global LNG industry to develop the first several hundred million tons of export capacity; now, the industry has the potential to do it again in six.
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