Special Reports

LNG's ongoing commoditization - resulting in smaller, shorter, flexible contracts with less credit-worthy buyers - is severely challenging new liquefaction financings. Several solutions have been proposed to ease this financing slowdown. In this S&P Global Platts special report, LNG financing leaders discuss other potential FID facilitators, including greater equity investments, increased LNG price hedging, project sponsor guarantees, and a more proactive approach from export credit agencies.

The first half of 2018 had a number of surprises for the metallurgical coal market, with Chinese environmental policies, strong thermal coal markets and other factors leading to changes in the price relationships between coal quality segments and changes in the availability of specific brands. At the same time, overall spot liquidity has been lower than the previous year as global steelmakers opted to procure more coal via term contracts.

The phenomenal growth in global LNG trade flows has been underpinned by a vast fleet of LNG carriers that numbers just shy of 500 vessels. The fleet has done for LNG, what container ships have done for manufactured products like the iPhone. It has made it possible for gas producers to propagate LNG as a global fuel and a global commodity. The global LNG fleet will grow at its fastest rate ever in 2018, with newer and better technologies. But will this be enough to absorb the vast amount of new LNG supply coming next year, mainly from the US, and still keep freight rates at affordable levels?

The US chemical industry is in the crosshairs of escalating trade tensions between the US and China that have spawned tariffs on hundreds of products from both countries. From steel and parts needed to build multibillion-dollar plants to numerous raw-material chemicals and plastics produced, tariffs have affected hundreds of billions of dollars in commerce between the world's two largest economies, and markets are responding accordingly.

The growth in US crude production over the last several years has revolutionized the global markets, with daily crude exports set to hit nearly 4 million barrels/day in 2020 from virtually nothing just three years ago. In this special report, S&P Global Platts looks at both the local and global impacts of the US' crude exports, tracing their path from the Permian Basin and Bakken Formation, through the country's vast pipeline network and out to the regional demand centers that have come to rely heavily on American oil.