The United Arab Emirates is growing its LNG exports to meet surging global demand that will outpace investment in supply, according to the UAE’s Energy Minister Suhail al-Mazrouei.
“We intend not only to satisfy our local demand, but we are also growing our export of LNG,” the minister told Reuters on the sidelines of the Abu Dhabi Financial Week.
“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.
This weekend, 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.
“I have no worry at all about demand in the future. I have a worry about lack of investment for additional supply in the future, which will cause prices to spike,” said Al-Kaabi, whose country is expanding its LNG export capacity, aiming to double it to 142 million tons per annum (mtpa) by the end of the decade.
Global supply is currently around 400 million tons of LNG annually, but demand will jump to 600-700 million tons by 2035, the Qatari official noted.
“That is an additional 200-300 million tons spearheaded by growth mostly in Asia, but also in the rest of the world, there is also something that we never counted on, whether in 2017 or even just a few years back, and that is artificial intelligence (AI),” Al-Kaabi told the Doha Forum this weekend.
Qatar’s neighbor, the UAE, a major oil producer in the Gulf, is now looking to boost its LNG production and export capacity, betting on its flagship Ruwais LNG project in Abu Dhabi. Ruwais LNG will be the first LNG export facility in the Middle Eastern and North African region to run on clean power, the UAE says.
The project, which will consist of two 4.8 million mtpa LNG liquefaction trains, will more than double ADNOC’s existing domestic LNG production capacity to around 15 million mtpa.
Ruwais LNG has already signed major long-term offtake deals, including with Germany and Shell. Commercial operations at the plant are on track to commence by the end of 2028, Abu Dhabi’s national oil company ADNOC says.
By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com
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