THE SIGNAL
One facility. One strait. One system.
The global LNG market looks diversified on paper. In reality, the chart below shows what that concentration looks like.
GED-the signal-0326
The US share looks larger than Qatar’s. But it is spread across eight export terminals on the Gulf Coast and one in Maryland – geographically distributed, with no single point of failure. Australia's 20 percent is similarly spread across seven facilities on opposite sides of the continent.
Qatar's 20 percent comes from one place.
That asymmetry is what the current crisis has revealed. When the US loses a terminal – as it did when Freeport LNG went offline for six months in 2022 – the market absorbs roughly 2–3 percent of global supply. When Qatar loses Ras Laffan, it loses all 20 percent simultaneously. There is no partial failure mode.
The second annotation on the chart matters as much as the first. Every tonne of that 20 percent exits through the Strait of Hormuz. No pipeline alternative exists. No rerouting is commercially viable at scale. The concentration of supply and the concentration of infrastructure are not two separate risks – they are the same risk expressed twice.
This is the chart to keep. If the crisis resolves in the coming weeks, the numbers in it will not have changed. The next disruption – whether in Qatar, Hormuz, or another large node – will look the same.
