In 2020, the growth rate of global LNG market will significantly slow down due to the decrease of supply and the demand destruction caused by the epidemic. Most analysts have sharply lowered their forecast for global LNG trade this year, and even predicted that global LNG trade will shrink year on year. This may be the most serious slowdown in global LNG market in many years. According to the data of international natural gas alliance, the natural gas industry organization, the global LNG trade volume in 2019 reached 35473 million tons, an increase of 13% over 2018, the sixth consecutive year of growth.
This year’s global LNG demand will decline year on year, and the forecast baseline is that the global LNG trade volume will be slightly less than 360 million tons in 2019. The company expects that the global LNG demand in 2020 will be 6.7 million tons less than that in 2019, and if there is a second outbreak, the global LNG demand this year may be 13.8 million tons less than last year. The decline in LNG demand has spread to countries such as India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Thailand, Kuwait and Singapore, while China and some European countries will see small growth. The company estimates that the average global LNG import volume from May to December is only 29 million tons / month, and that from January to April is 32 million tons / month.
It is expected that the demand in summer 2020 will be lower than that in summer 2019. This is the first contraction in eight years since the winter of 2012. The company expects global LNG demand to fall 2.7%, or 3 million tons, in the summer from a year earlier. “