Gastech: Bullish talk, angst over prices

“Resilience” and “diversity of supply” were common refrains at Gastech in Bangkok this week, as the gas industry tried to formulate a response to upheaval in global gas markets.

As gas executives gathered in Bangkok for the industry’s annual premier conference, more shocks continued to come out of the Middle East. The advance of the Houthis now threatens the Strait of Bab al-Mandab. The Saudi East-West pipeline is shut down for an unspecified period of time and Saudi Arabia has canceled some oil cargoes to Europe in response. Diesel prices are skyrocketing and price increases are showing no signs of slowing.

For LNG, flows through the Strait of Hormuz remain almost entirely closed off.

Asia’s JKM prices are trading around $25 per MMBtu, while TTF prices for northwest Europe are trading north of $27/MMBtu.

In Bangkok at Gastech, many gas executives used the turmoil to explain why more investment is urgently needed for new LNG supply, which could build shock absorbers into the system. At the same time, they sought to position the current crisis as temporary, downplaying the potential for permanent demand destruction that threatens the LNG industry.

Gastech typically involves a hive of activity in private meetings, where deals are cemented and announced publicly for the first time.

This year was no exception. Australia’s Santos signed two deals this week. A 10-year deal would see Santos send LNG to POSCO Steel beginning in 2030 or 2031. And in a separate agreement, Santos would purchase 1 million tonnes of LNG from the proposed Ksi Lisims project in Canada for 20 years beginning in 2031. However, both deals were non-binding.

Sempra and Petrobras announced a 20-year deal for 0.8 mtpa from Sempra’s Port Arthur Phase 2 project in Texas. Argentina’s YPF is hoping to close some deals for Argentina LNG.

The most significant announcement came from Venture Global and China Gas Holdings. A 20-year agreement beginning in 2030, the deal is notable given that the U.S.-China LNG trade came to an abrupt halt early last year after the Trump administration launched a trade war. The Venture Global deal, however, only represents a rather modest 0.5 million tonnes per year.

The handful of deals announced do indicate some interest in non-Middle East supply, but so far, the pace of dealmaking seems more subdued compared to the 2025 conference in Milan.

Meanwhile, repeated calls for resilience and more supply diversity reflect the industry’s concern that market chaos could leave lasting scars on the LNG trade.

India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Thailand and Vietnam have collectively spent $7.4 billion on spot LNG since the start of the war, more than twice as much as pre-war totals, according to Bloomberg. Policymakers in the region are contemplating a pivot away from LNG.

“Industrial growth is ‌slowing down, and production is going down,” Bangladesh’s energy minister Iqbal Hassan Mahmood said at Gastech. The price increase “is having a big effect.”

Bangladesh relies on LNG for around 40 percent of its power generation. Soaring prices for LNG imports are putting intense pressure on the budget, as the government subsidizes the fuel.

“If prices remain at such levels, we think that LNG will have a problem competing with the alternative fuels,” Fabian Kor, executive vice president for Asia at Germany’s SEFE Marketing & Trading Ltd., said at a conference in Singapore a week earlier, according to Bloomberg.

A massive uncertainty continues to loom over Gastech. What will global demand look like in the coming years and decades?

Industry leaders put on a brave face. “In the short-term, we will continue to see some demand adjustments that adjust to the reality of the supply constraints and affordability of energy,” Balaji Krishnamurthy, president of Chevron in Australia, told Bloomberg on the sidelines of Gastech. “However, in the long term the fundamentals, particularly for LNG, still remain very strong.”

When asked if he expects demand destruction in the short-term, Krishnamurthy responded: “Absolutely.” He made the case that a wave of supply coming online in the next few years will bring down prices.

ExxonMobil was more sanguine.

“The way that we look at the LNG business and the gas business over the long-term, we are extremely bullish about the demand growth that we see,” Andrew Barry, ExxonMobil vice president of global LNG marketing, said at the conference. “In fact, we see between now and 2050 that the demand growth for LNG will more than double over that period of time.”

Representatives from Asian companies were more cautious than those from western oil majors. Soaring prices are “definitely ​impacting” demand in India, GAIL Chairman Deepak Gupta said at Gastech. “A lot of sectors… are price sensitive.”

PetroChina’s CEO Luo Yizhou said gas demand for power generation in China would pick up if and when prices return to “normal” levels of around $7 to $9 per MMBtu.

While it is possible that prices could drop if the LNG market crashes into surplus later this decade, those price levels would put immense financial pressure on portfolio players, LNG traders, and LNG exporters in North America.

The elephant in the room was QatarEnergy, who up until February 2026 had a sterling reputation as the world’s largest and most reliable LNG supplier.

“We yearn for the day that our good friends and reliable sort of bedrock of the LNG industry at [QatarEnergy] come back and enable growth to a doubling [of demand] by the middle of the century,” Anatol Feygin, executive vice president at Cheniere Energy, said at Gastech.

The disconnect between the highly bullish 2050 calls that some industry leaders continue to cite and the current chaotic reality of the LNG market is stark. But in the short-term, there is no doubt that Cheniere and other U.S. suppliers have benefitted from Qatar’s outage and are now positioning their projects as more secure alternatives to the Middle East.

Some gas executives warned that Qatari LNG production would not return to normal anytime soon, even if the Strait of Hormuz reopens. In the early weeks of the war, rocket attacks destroyed 17 percent of Qatar’s massive Ras Laffan complex, and repairs could take three to five years.

“First of all you have reopening, and then you have restoration. Those are still two very different things,” Cederic Cremers, Shell’s president of integrated gas, said at Gastech. “Even if we would see a normalisation or reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, I don’t think you would immediately go back to the type of flows that we saw before the war started.”