How LNG Moves Gas Around the World — Import, Export, and the Plants That Flipped

LNG stands for liquefied natural gas. Natural gas is normally moved through pipelines, but a pipeline can't cross a wide ocean — so to ship gas by sea, you first turn it into a liquid. Chilled to about −162 °C, natural gas condenses into a liquid that takes up roughly 1/600th of its gaseous volume, cold and compact enough to load into the insulated tanks of a special tanker ship. An LNG terminal is the place on the coast where that happens: either an export terminal that chills and loads the gas, or an import terminal that receives the tankers and turns the liquid back into gas. This map plots 128 of these terminals worldwide, drawn as storage tanks and coloured by which job they do.

They're the two ends of the same journey. An export terminal does liquefaction: it takes gas from a pipeline, purifies and chills it until it's a liquid, and loads it onto tankers. These are expensive, energy-hungry plants, and they're built where there's gas to sell — Qatar, Australia, the United States, Algeria. An import terminal does regasification: it receives the tankers, stores the cold liquid, and warms it back into gas to feed into the local pipeline network. These are simpler and far more numerous, built wherever a country buys gas by sea — across Europe, Japan, South Korea, China, India. On the map, ember-orange tanks are export (liquefaction) terminals, ice-cyan tanks are import (regasification) terminals, and lilac tanks do both.

It's one of the sharpest reversals in modern energy. In the 2000s the United States expected to run short of gas, so companies built import terminals — Sabine Pass, Freeport, Cameron, Cove Point — to receive LNG from abroad. Then the shale boom hit: hydraulic fracturing unlocked enormous domestic gas reserves, and almost overnight the US went from a country bracing to import gas to one with a surplus to sell. Rather than abandon those brand-new import terminals, operators added liquefaction trains and re-tooled them to export the same gas they'd planned to receive. That's why a small 'both' category exists on this map: terminals built for one direction of the trade, rebuilt for the other.

Honesty about the data. On the wind and solar layers, every site is sized by its capacity in megawatts, because that figure is recorded. For LNG terminals there is no throughput or capacity figure in the underlying data (Wikidata) at all. Rather than invent a size — guessing, or drawing every tank identically and implying they're all the same — this map does what the pipelines layer does: it leaves size out and lets a thing that IS well recorded carry the story. Here that's the terminal's type (import, export, or both), shown as colour. So the map answers 'where is gas shipped from, and where is it received?' faithfully, without faking a 'how big?' it can't actually answer.

They're the sea-crossing link in a mostly land-based system. Gas reaches an export terminal through a pipeline, gets liquefied and shipped, and then — at an import terminal on the far side — is turned back into gas and fed into that country's pipeline network to reach power plants, factories and homes. LNG is what lets the global gas trade jump the gaps that pipelines can't bridge: between continents, across oceans, or to countries that don't trust a fixed pipeline link to a single supplier. Switch on the Pipelines layer alongside this one and you can see both halves of how gas moves — the fixed overland arteries, and the flexible seaborne bridges that connect them.