Global Gas Crunch, AI Demand Lift U.S. LNG Outlook for Bakken

A global natural gas supply crunch is sharpening the case for U.S. gas exports and, indirectly, for natural gas produced alongside Bakken oil in North Dakota. According to OilPrice.com, LNG spot market prices in Asia have tripled since the start of the year, with Asia and Europe locked in a race for a limited number of cargoes. The Japan-Korea Marker, the Asian LNG benchmark, topped $31 per million British thermal units this month and briefly rose above $33 per mmBtu, compared with a little over $9 per mmBtu in January.

The squeeze is being driven by the war in the Persian Gulf, which OilPrice.com said took one of the world’s top three liquefied gas exporters off the market. QatarEnergy extended a force majeure on its own LNG exports, and the International Energy Agency estimated the war between the United States and Israel, and Iran, cost the world some 60 billion cubic meters in LNG supply losses in the eight months to October.

Higher production in the United States and Africa helped fill much of that gap—as much as two-thirds—but the IEA expects global LNG production to decline 3% this year, with a 6% drop in the March-October period. OilPrice.com said that would be the steepest annual decline since records began.

OilPrice.com said replacing Qatar has proven difficult, even for the United States, which boosted LNG exports substantially, thanks mostly to strong demand from Europe, which has few alternatives to Qatari LNG. Asia, by contrast, has the alternative of coal and is taking advantage of it. The IEA warned this week that gas supply is tight and will remain tight next year as well.

The tightness comes as demand expectations rise amid the artificial intelligence boom. OilPrice.com reported that Big Tech has prioritized AI as its number-one growth engine, while data centers cannot be powered reliably by alternative energy sources such as wind and solar, even with batteries. OilPrice.com said the most viable—and quickest—option was natural gas. Shell said in its LNG Outlook 2026 that it expected demand for liquefied gas to surge by 65% between this year and 2050, despite the disruption in Qatari exports caused by the war. Shell’s head of natural gas operations said, “The conflict created a system-wide shock with disruption cascading across all segments of the economy, but the LNG industry has proved resilient and able to adapt to changing market conditions.”

For North Dakota, the backdrop matters because the Bakken formation is the state’s primary oil-producing region, and associated natural gas and pipeline gas can become more strategically valuable when global LNG cargoes are scarce. The U.S. is exporting record volumes of LNG, according to OilPrice.com, and Rigzone reported that the U.S. Energy Information Administration raised its U.S. total energy consumption projection for 2026 and 2027. Rigzone also reported that QatarEnergy placed a 20-year order for up to three million metric tons per annum of LNG from Woodside’s under-construction project on the U.S. Gulf Coast.

Bakken operators and royalty owners should watch these developments because tighter global gas supply, record U.S. LNG exports and rising U.S. energy demand forecasts shape the market for gas produced in North Dakota. The sources do not detail local Bakken wellhead prices, pipeline constraints or operator actions, but the market signal is that natural gas is gaining strategic importance when global LNG buyers are competing for cargoes.