China’s challenge: securing sufficient gas

The pandemic appears to have barely dented China’s hunger for gas. The difficulty remains building sufficient production, import, storage and transport capacity to satisfy demand

China’s natural gas demand has proved to be surprisingly resilient in the face of the Covid-19 outbreak. GDP fell by 6.8pc during the first quarter because of quarantines and lockdowns—the first time there has been a contraction on this scale since the cultural revolution. But despite this downturn, gas demand in Q1 ended up just 8-10bn m³ lower than was expected before the pandemic, according to Michal Meidan, director of the China energy programme at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies (OIES). This chimes with forecasts from Sublime China Information (SCI), a provider of commodity information and analysis based in Shandong province, that predicts a total loss against expectations for t