Re-Posting: Cheniere, Asia; Qatar Has Sold Its Entire Flexible Winter LNG Supply -- December 6, 2017

Updates

Later, 10:49 p.m. Central Time: see first comment --

The rapid development of improving liquification processes for natural gas has huge implications.

Telurian's $15 billion dollar cost to produce 27 million tons per year of LNG at its proposed Driftwood project is astonishingly low. [Lake Charles, Louisiana.]

For context, the massive LNG Gladstone operations off Queensland [Australia] cost about $60 billion for roughly the same capacity.

In addition, the Norwegian company, Golar, is teaming up with an outfit named Delfin to position 4 FLNG ships off Louisiana which will produce LNG much more cheaply yet.

On the other end, converting older ships into regasification facilities - FSRUs - will economically allow receipt of LNG almost anywhere in the world.

These are the reasons behind tentative plans to import US LNG into a Melbourne-based FSRU in a few years.

Coals to Newcastle.

Original Post

This is just one of the reasons I do not enjoy watching business shows on network television, particularly CNBC. [My latest stretch of not watching CNBC began last Thursday afternoon and continues). The show will spend all day (sometimes multiple days) talking about a single deal (like the Aetna - CVS story), talking about it ad nauseam and completely missing all the other incredible stories out there.

This was posted earlier. It's such an incredible story, on so many levels, I am re-posting it:

Cheniere boosts LNG tanker fleet amid Asian demand boom -- from Reuters via Rigzone, data points:

• expanded its shipping fleet with a flurry of spot vessel charters to keep up with Asian winter demand growth as spot prices hit three-year highs
• Cheniere's Sabine Pass terminal in Louisiana: 22 cargoes last month
• ramping up its fourth train
• more than half its shipments going to China, Japan, or South Korea
• can you say Panama Canal expansion (which the NY Times famously said the expansion was doomed to failure)
• < but get this: Qatar entirely sold out of flexible winter LNG supply following a frenetic period of deal-making with term buyers in China and South Korea
• Cheniere now has 22 ships on the water

It appears the world's largest exporter of LNG is no longer the swing producer; the swing producer/exporter for LNG is the US. 

This has been predicted for quite some time -- that the LNG market would get really, really tight. I did not expect it to happen so soon. Must be a cold, cold winter in Asia,

Making America great again -- with energy.