More than $200 billion of investment in liquefied natural gas is needed to meet a boom in demand by 2030, Royal Dutch Shell, the world’s top LNG trader, said on Monday. The LNG market is set to continue its rapid expansion into 2020 as facilities approved for construction in the first half of the decade come online, in a development expected easily to meet sharp growth in consumption of the super-chilled fuel. But a decline in spending in the sector since 2014 as a result of weaker energy prices will create a supply gap from the mid-2020s unless new investments emerge, Shell said in its 2018 LNG Outlook.
Processing units, known as trains, that cool natural gas to around minus 160 degrees Celsius (minus 260 Fahrenheit). The liquefied fuel is then shipped to demand centers and converted back into gas. While LNG demand is expected to grow from 293 million tonnes per year (mtpa) in 2017 to around 500 mtpa by 2030, supplies are seen slipping to 300 mtpa due to a lack of new projects and natural declines in existing production, Shell’s head of integrated gas and new energies, Maarten Wetselaar, said.