China’s Search for Blue Skies

Driven by a growing political requirement to fight air pollution, record growth has been recorded in natural gas demand in China over the past decade. China surpassed South Korea as the second largest LNG importer in 2017 and is projected to surpass Japan as the world’s largest natural gas importer in 2019.  The massive scale of the Chinese energy sector matters; a small change in the Chinese natural gas demand can lead to an oversized impact on global markets. As part of EPRINC’s ongoing assessment on the future role on LNG in Asia, this publication evaluates market and policy trends placing China in a central role as the driver of world LNG demand growth. The report can be found here.  A translation of the executive summary in Chinese can be found here.