China and Europe will decide global LNG demand in 2024
China and Europe will lead the rise in demand for liquefied natural gas this year, TotalEnergies forecasts.
“LNG has continued to grow, with China returning to the market but not yet at 2021 levels,” Thomas Maurisse, VP of Asia Exploration & Production, said at an industry event, as reported by Reuters .
“With Europe… it's a new and big market, demand will continue to grow. At the same time, new capacities will not come online in the short term and will therefore continue to put some pressure on prices and volatility.”
The last part of the forecasts could be less certain than the first: the European Commission recently declared that it wants to keep an eye on gas consumption and that it wants to contain it as much as possible. This will be easy if there is no economic growth, but it may be impossible if the European economy recovers.
Earlier this week, the European Commission proposed that EU member states continue to take voluntary measures to maintain a collective 15% reduction in gas demand compared to the five-year average until March 2022, as the bloc seeks to continue to stabilize its energy and gas supply.
Nonetheless, TotalEnergies is the latest energy major to predict a bright future for natural gas. Earlier this month, oil company Shell said it expects demand for LNG to increase by 50% in the years to 2040. According to Shell, demand growth will be led by China and across Asia, as Emerging economies in the region will switch from coal to natural gas to power their economies.
Demand for LNG has started to grow recently due to lower prices, which in turn was driven by weakening demand in key Asian and European markets. Asian demand is particularly sensitive to LNG prices, as it has weaker financial means than European buyers. As the last two years have shown, all it takes is one price surge for many Asian buyers to rethink their appetite for LNG. Furthermore, several countries have not abandoned coal and Japan is slowly restarting its nuclear energy production.
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The article China and Europe will decide global LNG demand in 2024 comes from Economic Scenarios .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/cina-ed-europa-decideranno-la-domanda-globale-di-gnl-nel-2024/ on Thu, 29 Feb 2024 07:00:45 +0000.