Hindsight is 20/20: What Happened to the Northeast When Pipelines Couldn’t Be Built?

The New England natural gas market has been subjected to winter price spikes for over a decade, and this trend appears likely to persist. Throughout most of the year, there is adequate natural gas pipeline capacity to serve regional gas demand. However, pipeline capacity is insufficient to meet peak gas demand during the coldest winter […]

Impacts on LNG Imports and Natural Gas Consumption Due to the Coronavirus in China

Dr. Ning Lin, Jiaxin Yang and Birdy Chen, RBAC, Inc. In January 2020 the Coronavirus, also known as COVID-19, created a significant amount of uncertainty in the Chinese natural gas market. As China is also considered a major demand center for LNG, that uncertainty has also spread throughout the global gas and LNG market.  The […]

The Future of Natural Gas in China, Gulf and India: Opportunities and Challenges

According to the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, the demand of natural gas in the Gulf countries will have a growth in 75% from now to 2030 which attributes to its development of urbanization and increasing of labor force. Also, the urgent requirements in its industrial and electric sectors should be considered. However, China aims […]

China’s Strategic Need to Open Doors for Foreign Investment in Upstream EP

Per Xinhua news agency, on Jan. 9, 2020, China’s Ministry of Mineral Resources announced today the opening of exploration and production to private investment. Domestic and foreign companies with local net assets of at least 300 million yuan ($43 million) can apply for licenses. The reform will take effect on May 1, 2020. This announcement […]

A Reality Check in the Wave of LNG Projects

As LNG trade becomes the fastest-growing segment of global gas and fuels much enthusiasm in investing in LNG facilities, it also presents a new concern to many participants in the market: with many competing LNG projects, do we have an oversupplied LNG market at hand? Two recent news in the past week was particularly interesting […]

How big is the deal – Impact of Trade War on LNG between the US and China

This is the first post in my mini-series of “track what matters” – a knowledge share for natural gas market analysis crowd. In this post, I discuss the logic to answer this question. I like to iterate – when you see the charts and numbers below, keep this in mind: this is not intended to […]

Putin Knew

Last week Bloomberg on MSN glibly reported that the Trump administration had conceded defeat in its effort to stop Russia’s Nordstream 2 pipeline. According to the article, the pipeline was already nearly complete and the latest sanctioning under the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) had failed.  https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-18/u-s-concedes-defeat-on-nord-stream-2-pipeline-officials-say CNBC agreed with Bloomberg stating that the NDAA […]

Will the “Rusty Patched Bumble Bee” Sting Dominion’s Atlantic Coast Pipeline?

Strange things can happen when natural gas pipeline companies move forward with final investment decisions (FID) and pipeline construction, even after they have received FERC approval. In the case of Dominion’s Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP), environmental concerns over the habitat of endangered species has stymied progress of the 600-mile project which will help evacuate Appalachian […]