Russia on the LNG market: is there response to old and new competitors?

After several decades of practically uninterrupted growth the world LNG market has been stagnating for the second year in a row.

The global financial crisis that occurred five years ago led to difficulties with adoption of final investment decisions on many projects in the sphere of production and exports of liquefied natural gas; difficulties with financing and designing emerged even at the construction stage.

The crisis was coupled with the USA giving up the role of major LNG consumer, the role that Washington was intensively preparing for in the mid 2000s. This happened as a result of growth in production of its domestic shale gas and from other untraditional sources.

On the world LNG market this led to intensified flows of liquefied natural gas between major but separate regional markets – North America, Europe and Asia. However, the gas business is waiting for a new wave of the LNG boom. Experts forecast the market to be supplied by LNG produced in Australia, North America and southeastern Africa. Qatar that has already caused many problems to us, in 2014 is to make a decision on the future of its gas projects.

The infrastructure of LNG imports keeps developing at a high pace creating premises for formation of a more flexible market, development of the arbitrage system and turning LNG into a world mechanism of balancing the demand for gas in different parts of the planet.

Competition on foreign markets overlaps with domestic competition. Russia has been lagging somewhat behind in developing its LNG projects, and now it is trying to catch up. The question is whether the struggle of Russian projects against each other will strengthen our positions on the LNG market.

Key topics of the report:

• Structure of production and consumption on the LNG market

  • Balance of the demand and supply
  • Temporary deficit on the market

• Main tendencies in trade and pricing

  • Flows between the basins
  • Spot development
  • Bottlenecks in LNG business

• New projects of liquefied natural gas production

  • The main thing is to separate real future capacities from speculative and fancy ones
  • Analysis of the future of Australian projects, export potential of North American shale gas, LNG projects in eastern Africa, on the Levant coast, LNG potential of Iran and South America, Qatari reserves

• Condition and prospects of Russian projects in the LNG sphere

  • What will be the results of partial liberalization of exports?
  • The present and the future of Gazprom projects, Yamal LNG and Yamal LNG-2, Far Eastern LNG and other plans of Rosneft

• Functioning of LNG market in corporate dimension

  • Vertical chains in LNG trade

• Medium-term forecast of the industry development, assessment of Russian LNG competitiveness

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