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Cheniere Energy liquefies natural gas and ships it around the world as LNG.
Cheniere Energy is the biggest American company that turns natural gas into a liquid and ships it overseas. It buys gas from producers in places like Texas and Louisiana, cools it down to about minus 260 degrees Fahrenheit until it becomes a liquid, and loads it onto special tanker ships. Those ships carry the fuel to utilities, energy companies, and traders in Asia, Europe, and elsewhere, where it gets turned back into gas and burned for electricity or heating.
The reason anyone bothers with this is that gas is awkward to move across oceans. Pipelines only work over land, so a country with lots of cheap gas can't easily sell it to a country that needs it. Chilling gas into liquid shrinks it to roughly 1/600th of its original volume, which makes it economical to load onto ships. Cheniere built the first big export terminals in the lower 48 states to do exactly that — its Sabine Pass facility in Louisiana started shipping in 2016, followed by a terminal at Corpus Christi, Texas. For years before that, the company was mostly an importer, and the pivot to exporting nearly killed it during a debt crunch around 2012 before it found backers and finished construction. How it makes money is the interesting part. Much of Cheniere's revenue comes from long-term contracts where customers pay a fixed fee for the right to take a certain amount of liquefied gas each year — whether they actually take it or not. That fee covers Cheniere's plant costs and gives it steady, predictable cash flow, while the customer supplies or pays for the gas itself. Cheniere also sells some gas on its own account, which means it makes extra money when prices are high and less when they're low. This mix gives it a steadier business than a pure commodity trader, but it still carries real exposure to global gas prices and to the health of its big customers.
The company's customers are the giant energy traders and utilities, names like Shell, BP, and TotalEnergies, along with Asian buyers such as JERA and Chinese importers. Its main competitors are other LNG exporters: QatarEnergy is the world's largest, and ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips both have big liquefaction projects. Cheniere's edge is scale, location, and a head start — it sits close to cheap American shale gas and to the Gulf Coast shipping lanes. The risks are real too: construction projects can run over budget, gas prices swing wildly, and new plants take years and billions of dollars to build before they earn a dime.
Saved answer · last researched 15 Nov 2026