China’s regasification capacity is expected to grow two-thirds to 250 million metric tons by the end of the decade, from 150 million now, a BP BP.L executive said.

Asian demand growth for gas is substantial and strong, said Elaine Skinner-Reid, the firm’s senior vice president for international gas and power, adding that she expected demand for the fuel from China and India to grow.

“We’ve got the traditional hubs of Japan, Korea and Taiwan, which will see pretty stable demand in our expectations to the end of the decade,” she said at the Financial Times Commodities Asia Summit.

“On China and India and the growth that we’ve seen over the last year, we expect will continue to grow.”

China, Japan and South Korea were the world’s top three LNG importing countries last year.

Any tariffs Donald Trump’s administration might adopt would create an inflationary effect hitting growth, she added, but not enough to hit demand for the fuel in Asia, spurred by the energy transition and coal-to-gas switching for power generation.

“Tariffs will come in, we will see the pace of that as it evolves,” she said.

“It will be inflationary, and that will be bad for growth, but we don’t think it’s significant enough to damage the demand for gas, which is growing, undoubtedly, from now until the end of the decade, in almost every scenario.”
Source: Reuters (Reporting by Emily Chow in Singapore; Editing by Jamie Freed and Clarence Fernandez)