Coming back to Natural Gas prices there are some negative headlines about China LNG imports around this morning doing some digging its seems that this isn’t strictly new news but it is worth being aware of given China’s prominent position as a commodity importer and the fact that US Natural Gas is increasingly exported as LNG.

Dutch bank ING had this to say on the subject on Thursday last week :

“China driving the weakness in Asian LNG demand

China’s LNG demand has been weak this year. Imports in 2025 are set to be around 16% lower year-on-year. There are a number of factors weighing on demand. First, the bulk of Chinese gas demand comes from the industrial sector (in the region of 40%), so any industrial weakness will weigh on demand.

China’s official manufacturing PMI has been in contractionary territory in nine of the past 11 months. Second, China worked to increase domestic production, which has grown 6.3% YoY. Finally, pipeline gas imports continue to grow – up 7.6% YoY.

Looking ahead, there’s a push to continue increasing pipeline flows into China. Russia is keen to progress with Power of Siberia 2, which could bring 50bcm of additional pipeline gas to China.
Obviously, it would be unlikely that we see these flows anytime soon, given the need to build the pipeline.

However, there appear to be steps being taken to expand the capacity of pipelines currently operating or set to start up imminently. If China turns increasingly to pipeline gas, it shifts the demand outlook dramatically for the LNG market. It would raise additional concerns about oversupply, given the amount of LNG export capacity which is set to start up by the end of this decade.”