LNG projects continue to attract large-scale investment across the value chain. Yet a surprising number stall before FID, slip during execution, or fail to deliver value in operations.
Strategy alone does not deliver projects.
As this Perspective explores, our work across global LNG markets shows a consistent driver behind this: commercial implementation failure.
Highlights
- Many LNG project begin with strong commercial logic. The challenge emerges not in the strategy itself, but in the absence of a bridge between strategic design and day-to-day commercial operations.
- We see negotiations increasingly becoming narrow battles over price and flexibility, but commercial deliverability is often the more decisive variable in value capture
- Technical readiness usually receives structured governance. Commercial readiness does not, despite being equally critical to FID.
- Disputes are becoming more frequent, but very few arise from understandable surprises. The ‘unknown unknowns’ often become ‘known’ during periods of market stress, as we have seen often in the last six years.
Common barriers we observe
- Contracts incomplete or unaligned with financing expectations.
- Execution contract chains not fully assembled.
- Shipping strategies still conceptual, not operationalised.
- Value chain interfaces defined in principle but not in practice.
- Ambiguous risk allocation frameworks.
- Stakeholders not aligned behind a single commercial narrative.
