Geopolitics of Natural Gas Project Summary: Insights to 2040

We summarize four main project results that should dominate strategic thinking about the next three decades' shift to increasing reliance on natural gas:

• An integrated global gas market will emerge, in which events in any individual region or country will affect all regions.
• The role of governments in natural gas market development will change dramatically in the coming decades.
• The rising geopolitical importance of natural gas implies growing attention to supply security.
• The rapid shift to a global gas market is not a certainty. It depends enormously on creating the context in which investors will have confidence to deploy vast sums of financial and intellectual capital; it requires finding solutions to the adverse social and political consequences of developing natural resources in countries where governance is weak; and it assumes a continued pull from the growing world electricity sector.