Liquefied Natural Gas is natural gas cooled to −162 °C until it becomes a clear, colorless liquid roughly 600 times smaller in volume than the gas it came from. That single fact — a 600:1 shrink — is what makes it possible to sell gas from Qatar to Japan, or from Texas to Poland, without a pipeline. This hub introduces the idea and points to the deeper explanations.
What does LNG stand for?
LNG stands for liquefied natural gas — that is the full form of the acronym, and it is the whole of the meaning. It is sometimes written “liquified natural gas”; both spellings refer to the same thing.
The name is literal. Take natural gas, the same fuel that reaches a kitchen hob or a power station through a pipe, and cool it until it condenses into a liquid. Nothing is added, nothing is chemically changed. What comes out is a clear, colorless, odorless cryogenic liquid that is still natural gas — just in a different phase.
The temperature that does this is −162 °C (−260 °F), the boiling point of methane at atmospheric pressure. At that point the gas occupies about 1/600th of its original volume, which is the entire commercial reason LNG exists: a cargo small enough to put on a ship. The temperature of LNG and the physics behind it are covered in detail elsewhere on this site.
LNG in brief
- It is not a different fuel. LNG is ordinary natural gas in its liquid phase. Warm it up and it becomes gas again — that step is called regasification.
- Cold, not compressed. LNG sits at close to atmospheric pressure. It is the temperature (−162 °C, the boiling point of methane) that does the work, which is what distinguishes it from CNG.
- Mostly methane. Typically 85–95% methane (CH4), plus ethane, propane, butane and nitrogen. CO2, water, sulphur and mercury are stripped out beforehand, because they would freeze solid and damage the plant.
- Lighter than water. At about 450 kg/m³ LNG floats, and it evaporates rather than pooling — which shapes how spills behave.
- It boils constantly. No insulation is perfect, so a small fraction evaporates every day as boil-off gas. Ships burn it as fuel rather than waste it.
Start here
The physics of LNG
Why −162 °C and 600:1 are the numbers that define everything else: composition, density, thermodynamics of the phase change, boil-off, and heating value.
12 min readLNG temperature
Why −162 °C is the number: the boiling point of methane, what “at atmospheric pressure” means, and how a cargo stays cold for weeks at sea.
7 min readWhat LNG is used for
Power generation, heating, industrial feedstock, marine bunkering, heavy trucking, and off-grid “virtual pipeline” supply — and what LNG is not used for.
10 min readThe future of LNG
Bio-LNG, synthetic e-LNG, hydrogen blending and carbon capture — the routes being proposed to reconcile a gas-dependent world with net-zero targets.
11 min readWhy the 600:1 ratio matters
Natural gas is awkward to move. At ambient conditions its energy density is so low that shipping it as a gas is pointless, which historically tied gas markets to whatever a pipeline could reach. Pipelines are cheap per unit of gas but expensive to build, politically exposed, and impossible across deep ocean.
Liquefaction changes the economics. Once gas occupies 1/600th of its volume, a single cargo becomes worth moving by sea, and a producer in one hemisphere can compete for a buyer in another. That is why LNG turned a set of disconnected regional gas markets into something closer to a global one — and why events such as a Qatari outage or a cold European winter now move prices in Asia within days.
The trade-off is energy and cost. Liquefaction consumes roughly 8–10% of the feed gas’s energy, the ships and terminals are specialized and expensive, and the extra processing steps add emissions that a pipeline does not. Whether that trade-off is worth making is the subject of the comparisons and environmental sections.
Where to go next
Once the basics make sense, the rest of the site follows the physical chain: gas is liquefied, shipped, and turned back into gas; it is priced against regional benchmarks and traded between exporting and importing countries; and it carries a carbon footprint and a safety profile that are both actively debated. Unfamiliar terms are defined in the glossary.