Surging liquefied natural gas exports from new North American export plants likely pushed global LNG shipments in 2025 by the most since 2022, Kpler data showed on Tuesday.
This year, global LNG supply swelled by 4% from 2024 to reach 429 million tons, per the vessel-tracking data from Kpler quoted by Bloomberg.
The annual rise in 2025 would be the steepest increase in global LNG exports since 2022, when shipments grew by 4.5% compared to 2021, the data showed.
North America was the key supplier of new LNG volumes, as Canada’s first-ever export facility, LNG Canada, started shipments in the middle of 2025, and Plaquemines LNG in Louisiana launched operations and ramped up shipments throughout the year.
Thanks to rising capacity and volumes, the U.S. is set to become the first LNG exporter in the world to have passed in 2025 the threshold of 100 million tons of LNG exports in one year.
Additional LNG supply is poised to hit the market between 2026 and 2030 as more U.S. export plants come online and Qatar begins shipments from its huge capacity expansion of the North Field export facilities.
The U.S. is set to export 14.9 billion cubic feet per day of LNG in 2025, up by 25% from 2024, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) said in its latest Short-Term Energy Outlook (STEO) for December. With new projects ramping up, the EIA expects U.S. LNG exports to jump to an average of 16.3 billion cubic feet per day in 2026.
Despite warnings of a near-term global LNG glut, top exporters in the Middle East, including Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), see strong demand going forward and flag insufficient investment in supply in the medium to long term.
The UAE is growing its LNG exports to meet surging global demand that will outpace investment in supply, Energy Minister Suhail al Mazrouei told Reuters earlier in December.
“I agree with his excellency, Minister of Qatar, that the demand is going to be much, much more than the projects that we are seeing,” the UAE official added.
Earlier this month, Saad Sherida Al-Kaabi, QatarEnergy’s CEO and the Minister of State for Energy Affairs of Qatar, said that global LNG demand will grow, led by increased power needs from AI-related data centers.
By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com
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