China’s lockdown finally eased at the end of 2022 enabling economic activity to return and become more frequent in 2023. China’s natural gas consumption grew by nearly 8% in 2023, close to the pre-pandemic level of 9% growth in 2019.
With the recovery of domestic gas demand, China’s LNG imports in 2023 increased by 18% over the previous year, whereas LNG imports in 2022 experienced a drop of 24% compared with 2021. China imported a total of 72 million tons of LNG in 2023, surpassing Japan which imported 66 million tons, once again becoming the world’s largest LNG importer.
Compared with Japan and South Korea, thanks to its geographical advantages, China has its own domestic natural gas production and pipeline gas imports. The sharp increase in LNG imports has not significantly squeezed the growth of other gas supplies.
The proportion of pipeline gas has remained basically unchanged, and though the proportion of domestic production has decreased slightly, the volume of pipeline gas imports and production have maintained a steady growth over the past three years.
Due to the relatively low absolute cost of pipeline gas, it is possible that with geopolitical changes, if Power of Siberia 2 pipeline is successfully put into operation in the 2030s, there will be a large increase in pipeline gas imports in the future.