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The U.S. is at the tail end of an incredible wave of LNG expansion that has so far seen nine new projects across seven terminals reach a final investment decision (FID) in a little over a year. The two latest projects, Commonwealth LNG and Delfin FLNG, had been approaching the developmental finish line for some time. Commonwealth’s greenlight should come as no surprise, while Delfin’s was somewhat more unexpected. But more important than the individual projects, the overall scale of the buildout coming in the back half of this decade and into early next decade is staggering. The U.S. can export around 16.1 Bcf/d of LNG today, with another 1.2 Bcf/d of capacity ramping online, but capacity will be around 33 Bcf/d by early next decade given the number of projects that have reached FID or are under construction. For reference, that’s less than 3 Bcf/d shy of total U.S. gas demand for power in 2025. In today’s RBN blog, we take a closer look at this incredible wave of investment, the Commonwealth LNG project and what comes next for U.S. LNG development.
This latest round of commitments to U.S. LNG started out with a surprise. In late April 2025, Australia’s Woodside Energy announced that it was moving forward with the 16.5 million tons per annum (MMtpa; 2.2 Bcf/d) Louisiana LNG (purple-and-white striped diamond in Figure 1 below) despite having almost no long-term sales for the project — seeI’m Back (Back in the LNG Groove). Woodside decided to stick with the method it had used to develop its Australian projects, where it sold ownership interest to de-risk its investment, rather than conform to the typical development approach of U.S. builders, which relies heavily on long-term sales to underpin a project. That was soon followed by a Cheniere Energy FID on a small Corpus Christi expansion project (orange-and-white striped diamond) in June and then Venture Global’s FID of CP2 Phase 1 (pink-and-white striped diamond) in July. Then, last fall, Sempra greenlit two additional trains at the under-construction Port Arthur LNG (aqua-and-gray striped diamonds), and NextDecade also added two trains (Train 4 in September and Train 5 in November) to Rio Grande LNG (bright-green-and-gray striped diamonds) in South Texas.
