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MATTEO VERDA<br />
38<br />
bcm), Brunei (9 bcm) and Yemen<br />
(9 bcm), followed by several other<br />
smaller ones.<br />
Natural gas producing countries<br />
that export only a minor part of<br />
their total production via LNG represent<br />
a further category. The most<br />
important is Russia, the world’s biggest<br />
exporter of gas, which in 2013<br />
supplied more than 200 bcm to international<br />
markets, 14 of which via<br />
the Sakhalin liquefaction terminal. A<br />
similar amount was exported by Algeria,<br />
while a much smaller amount<br />
was exported by Norway (4 bcm).<br />
Incidentally, all three countries are<br />
major suppliers of the EU market via<br />
pipeline, thereby limiting the incentives<br />
to promote a massive development<br />
of their LNG capacity to supply<br />
their core markets.<br />
NEW INFRASTRUCTURES: AN LNG<br />
GLUT<br />
Natural gas export is a capital-intensive<br />
activity, which in the past<br />
developed thanks to long-term commitments,<br />
whether in the case of<br />
piped or liquefied gas. This is bound<br />
to remain a central feature even in<br />
the current decade, since the global<br />
market for LNG has not yet developed<br />
a liquidity and a hub-based<br />
structure which could allow a substantial<br />
decoupling between infrastructural<br />
investments and a prior<br />
long-term commitment made by<br />
one or more buyers. A potential evolution<br />
towards a substantially liquid<br />
market may come in the next decade,<br />
but it depend on the further expansion<br />
of the LNG export capacity and<br />
a larger diffusion of the import terminals,<br />
both in terms of capacity and<br />
the countries involved.<br />
A significant boost to the size of the<br />
LNG market will come from projects<br />
currently under construction and<br />
which are expected to be commissioned<br />
by the end of this decade. The<br />
most important aspect is liquefaction<br />
capacity, since import capacity<br />
is currently oversized, even if unevenly<br />
distributed: 104 terminals in<br />
29 countries and 950 bcm per year<br />
represent a massive endowment.<br />
Local investments in more dynamic<br />
markets will be required, but in general<br />
regasification capacity is unlikely<br />
to represent a bottleneck for the<br />
market at this stage.<br />
Export capacity is instead heavily<br />
exploited, and new supplies will<br />
play a decisive role in the evolution<br />
of the market. At the end of 2013,<br />
theoretical global liquefaction ca-
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