Looking past the glut

Charif Souki and Martin Houston think now is the time to start building more US liquefaction capacity

Sometime early next decade the glut in liquefied natural gas will be gone and customers will be scrounging for fresh supply. Charif Souki and Martin Houston, two men with a long history in the business, will be ready. Cargoes of LNG will arrive in Europe from their plant in Louisiana, landing for a price of just $7 per 1,000 cubic feet (cf). Today’s supply surfeit doesn’t matter. The market will need their gas, and they will produce it more cheaply than anyone else on the planet. That’s the plan anyway. In today’s market it looks bold, to say the least. The world isn’t short of LNG or proposals to build more liquefaction capacity (see p16-35). The crash in seaborne-gas prices has brought a r