Cheniere surprised by lack of European LNG contracting

US seller sees Asian buyers changing approach but inertia in Europe

“What is surprising to me is that… a very small percentage of [the recent LNG SPA flurry] is with European load-serving entities,” Anatol Feygin, chief commercial officer of the US’ largest LNG exporter, Cheniere Energy, told the Gastech conference in Milan in September. In contrast, US exporters are already seeing a reaction from Asian buyers to a global gas market radically altered owing to the drop in Russian pipeline deliveries to Europe. A “fair amount” of the new supply agreements struck over the last seven months are with “European-based entities that that will function as [load servers]”, Feygin concedes. By that, he likely means large IOCs such as BP, Shell and Equinor, and trading