By Irina Mironova for Cedigaz
Australia remains one of the world’s largest LNG exporters and one of the earliest large-scale LNG success stories in the Asia-Pacific region. The country strengthened its export position through a wave of liquefaction projects commissioned between 2015 and 2019, including GLNG, Australia Pacific LNG, Gorgon, Wheatstone, Ichthys and Prelude.
For years, discussions about Russia’s LNG future have focused on liquefaction capacity. How many trains could be built? How quickly could new projects come online? Could Russia achieve its ambition of becoming one of the world’s largest LNG exporters?
Today, those questions remain relevant, but they are no longer the most important ones.
Russia’s ability to increase LNG exports is increasingly determined not by liquefaction capacity, but by the logistical and technological constraints that connect liquefaction plants to end-users. In other words, the bottleneck has shifted downstream.
In a volatile and unstable economic and geopolitical context, global natural gas consumption grew at a modest rate of 0.7% to 4181 bcm in 2025, translating to around 31 bcm of additional consumption, according to Cedigaz first estimates. This represents a notable slowdown in natural gas demand growth from 2024, when it surged by 2.7%. In the first half of the year, high spot LNG prices, weak industrial activity in price-sensitive sectors and unseasonably mild weather across Northeast Asia weighed on natural gas demand. However, natural gas demand accelerated during the second half of the year amid easing market conditions due to a pronounced rebound of LNG supply. Indeed, the year 2025 marked the biggest jump in LNG supply since 2019. Thanks to the strong expansion of flexible LNG, driven by the United States, natural gas markets are increasingly intertwined with broader global security challenges. Spot LNG price signals played a crucial role in the reorientation of LNG cargoes from Asia to Europe. The European gas supply is increasingly dependent on flexible LNG supply to replace piped volumes lost from Russia and replenish storage ahead of winter. The year 2025 emphasized the key role of natural gas in the electricity sector for balancing out renewable energy sources in both emerging and advanced economies.