Global natural gas demand will keep growing through 2035 in every scenario, rising by almost a fifth as power generation absorbs half of the increase. The LNG glut the market expected for 2026 will arrive later and end sooner, and the binding constraint on supply over the next decade will be export infrastructure rather than reserves, says GlobalData, a leading market intelligence platform.
GlobalData’s latest report, “GlobalData Gas Market Outlook 2026,” reveals that world demand rises just under 20% between 2025 and 2035, to 5,180 bcm, at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 1.8%. Power generation contributes 432 bcm of the increase and Asia-Pacific 284 bcm. The report combines country-level demand modeling, built on detailed macroeconomic, power, and industrial data, with GlobalData’s proprietary asset-level data on gas fields, LNG plants, pipelines, and storage sites, and tests the results across six scenarios.
Paul Hasselbrinck, Oil & Gas Lead Analyst at GlobalData, comments: “The market has spent two years debating a gas glut. GlobalData’s field-by-field data show that the glut is real but short, and that the question for the 2030s is not whether there is enough gas in the ground, but whether the pipelines and LNG plants get built where that gas is.”
The 2026 disruption in the Strait of Hormuz cut off access to about a fifth of global LNG supply and damaged 12.8 mtpa of Qatari liquefaction capacity. GlobalData estimates that Middle Eastern gas production falls by 98 bcm this year, so world supply grows by only 14.9 bcm against 37.7 bcm of notional demand growth, with an estimated 38-59 bcm of supply-constrained demand unserved.
Hasselbrinck adds: “2026 was a transit shock, not a resource shortage. Prices in Europe and Asia react to market dislocation, with a main shipping route closed and a small share of liquefaction damaged, but global production rose in 2026. That is why GlobalData expects the market to normalize as Gulf exports return, rather than to reset at a permanently higher level, albeit in a U-shaped, not V-shaped recovery.”
From 2027, Gulf exports return and 281.3 mtpa of liquefaction at construction or commissioning stage starts up by 2031, mostly in the US and Qatar. The surplus of supply over demand peaks at about 200 bcm in 2029, but growing demand closes it quickly: the market balances in 2034 and turns short in 2035. Field by field, 166 bcm of the upstream supply planned for 2035 has no sanctioned or FID-dated route to market, with Senegal, Tanzania, Mauritania, Guyana, and Cyprus accounting for most of it.
Hasselbrinck continues: “The US faces the opposite problem to the frontier markets: its approved and FID-dated liquefaction needs about 400 bcm more gas in 2035 than US companies have yet committed to produce. Whether that gas arrives will set how far the transatlantic price spread narrows.”
The decisive variable for supplying the 2030s is infrastructure. Unless export routes are sanctioned in the new frontier, and US production keeps pace with US liquefaction, a market that looks oversupplied today will be short by the middle of the next decade.
Hasselbrinck concludes: “For demand, the risks to the Reference demand outlook are asymmetric and skewed to the downside. The upside from cheaper LNG or an AI-driven power boom is bounded at a combined 3.5% of 2035 demand, about a quarter of the 8% downside from accelerated transition.”