LNG Supply at Risk as Project Delays Clash With Surging Global Demand
Bibliographic record
Abstract
_ If natural gas is the new oil, then LNG is the engine driving global mega infrastructure investment and powering growth in upstream exploration and development to ensure sufficient supply for liquefaction well into the 2030s and beyond. Shell’s LNG Outlook 2025 forecasts a 60% rise in demand for LNG by 2040, driven by economic growth across Asia, decarbonization in heavy industry and transport, and rising energy needs driven by artificial intelligence. While global demand is set to rise over the next 15 years, new production capacity starts to decline in 2034, setting the stage for a widening gap between supply and demand, according to Shell’s outlook (Fig. 1). The International Gas Union (IGU) red-flagged a decline in final investment decision (FID) activity in 2024, noting in its 2025 World LNG report that the approximately 15 mtpa of new liquefaction capacity reaching FID last year was the “lowest annual approval volume since 2020 and well below the 58.8 mtpa greenlighted in 2023.” Whether that’s cause for concern depends on the volume of pre-FID projects in play and the industry’s appetite for investing in a critical mass of those projects. As a new investment cycle begins, the aging project pipeline needs refilling. North America led the world in pre-FID activity in 2024, with proposals for approximately 648 mtpa in new aspirational liquefaction capacity, mostly in the US. Projects in Canada and Mexico also contributed to the region’s lead. The North American figure outpaced No. 2 ranked Russia’s 170 mtpa in pre-FIDs by a factor of three, with Africa finishing a close third at 133 mtpa, according to the IGU report. The Middle East proposed 66.5 mtpa in pre-FIDs in 2024, closely followed by Asia Pacific at 67.0 mtpa, while the rest of the world contributed 36 mtpa. US Strives To Maintain Dominance Since the US lifted its permitting pause in January, it has accounted for nearly 95% of all new LNG capacity sanctioned globally in the first half of 2025, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA) Global LNG Capacity Tracker. Already-sanctioned projects are expected to bring nearly 295 Bcm/year of new LNG export capacity onstream by 2030, marking the largest wave of capacity additions to date, the IEA noted. Given that the IEA 2030 estimate for new export capacity excludes pre-FID activity, that wave of LNG development could become a tsunami. According to IGU, global liquefaction capacity could triple if all currently proposed projects move forward. Though not all pre-FID activity leads to final investment, recent announcements of long-term supply agreements, new partnerships, and permit awards suggest that several proposed LNG projects are headed for near-term sanction.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.024 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.068 | 0.013 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".