The industry has been pre-empting a rapid depression of prices, caused by a rush of supply, as projects producing a total of 40 – 50 million tpy of LNG are due to come online over the next two years (mainly in Australia and the US).
However, the surge in Asian LNG demand last year – particularly last winter – have altered many expert’s predictions. There is now growing optimism that the new LNG supplies coming online in 2018 will be easily absorbed by the continuing high demand for LNG across Asia.
Jean-Pierre Mateille, vice president of trading at Total’s gas and power division, commented: “For the past three years, we were told at every conference that we’ll have a gas bubble, that gas is oversupplied, that we won’t be able to sell LNG... but it’s a bubble that never came.”
