Overview
Kpler's LNG & Natural Gas Supply & Demand (S&D) API product provides an 18-month rolling forward-looking view of the global LNG market and natural gas balances of the world's key gas economies. It brings together two connected balances:
Global LNG balance: supply and demand for liquefied natural gas, grounded in Kpler's near-real-time flows data;
Natural gas balances for a set of key economies: full supply/demand/storage balances that show where LNG fits within each market's wider gas picture.
The two are designed to be read together, and the natural gas balance is what ultimately drives LNG demand, so LNG is best understood alongside the gas balance that sits behind it.
The product answers:
How is LNG supply expected to evolve as new liquefaction capacity comes online?
Where is incremental LNG demand coming from?
How does a given country balance domestic production, pipeline flows, storage, and LNG imports to meet demand?
At launch, the product is delivered via API only, with other delivery methods expected to follow longer-term. The data is published through monthly releases (snapshots), and each API response carries metadata, including a release timestamp that indicates exactly when the data was last updated.
What's covered
| LNG balance | Natural gas balances |
Geographic scope | Global (≈55 supply/demand countries, plus the EU sub-regions). | Key gas economies only – United States, China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, India, Pakistan, Thailand, Bangladesh, Egypt, Kuwait, Brazil, Colombia, Argentina, Dominican Republic, and the EU-27 (with member-state demand). |
Granularity | Demand at country level (the EU is reported by sub-region: EU-27 North West, EU-27 South, Rest of EU-27); supply at country level for domestic gas production and down to individual liquefaction installation. | Country level, with an EU special case (see below). |
Splits/filters |
| By country, or as a single, full EU-27 balance (see EU special case). |
Units | Million tonnes (Mt). | Default of billion cubic metres (bcm); switchable to billion cubic feet per day (bcfd). |
Time resolution and horizon
Granularity: monthly. There is no other temporal aggregation – every figure is a calendar-month value.
History: monthly history starting from January 2017 (note: certain datatsets' historical coverage may begin later).
Forecast: an 18-month rolling forward outlook.
Update frequency: monthly at launch, with plans to increase the refresh frequency (toward fortnightly, keeping the monthly resolution) over time.
The LNG balance
The LNG balance reports supply and demand for liquefied natural gas. Unlike most commodities, LNG only exists as LNG while it is underway on ships – it is liquefied at the export plant and regasified at the import terminal. As a result, the LNG balance is, in essence, a flows-based view: historical LNG supply and demand matches what is observed in Kpler's flows data.
In addition to supply and demand, the LNG balance includes a balancing factor – a single, global residual (reported on the World zone) that reconciles the difference between worldwide supply and demand for each month. This accounts for factors like boil-off and other losses. LNG metrics are reported in million tonnes (Mt).
The natural gas balances
For each covered economy, the natural gas balance provides overall supply and demand, each broken down into its contributing components, plus storage for Japan, South Korea, China, US, and EU-27. The balance closes with a balancing factor that reconciles the equation.
Demand is broken into components that vary by geography – the relevant end-use categories, and their terminology, differ from country to country, reflecting how each market is actually structured and how granular Kpler's coverage is there. For example, on the demand side:
The United States resolves demand into residential & commercial, industry, power, lease & plant fuel, pipeline & distribution use, pipeline exports, and LNG feedgas;
India uses industry, power, city gas, and fertilizer;
EU member states (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Portugal) use residential & commercial, industry, and power;
Much of importing Asia (Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan) uses just power and non-power;
China utilises residential and commercial, power, industrial and chemical, and LNG trucking demand.
Supply components are more consistent across countries:
Domestic production;
Pipeline imports – further split by source country where relevant (each market shows only its own pipeline suppliers);
LNG imports – the metric that links the natural gas balance back to the LNG balance;
Other supply;
Net withdrawal from storage.
Storage is reported as absolute storage level and storage capacity (with power/non-power breakdowns where available), alongside the storage net-withdrawal flow on the supply side. Each gas balance closes with its own balancing factor (reported per zone – unlike the LNG balance, where the balancing factor is a single global figure). Because the set of metrics is not the same for every market, the natural gas balances are best read country by country – see Important usage notes below.
Units
The default unit is billion cubic metres (bcm). A switch to billion cubic feet per day (bcfd) is available for flow metrics. Storage level and capacity metrics are point-in-time volumes, rather than rates, so when imperial units are selected, they are expressed in billion cubic feet (bcf) – not bcf/d. Conversion: 1 bcf ≈ 0.02834 bcm.
The EU: a special case
For most covered economies, all natural gas metrics sit on a single geographic entity. The EU is a little different: the various elements of the balance are available at different levels, while the metrics themselves remain consistent.
Demand is available for several individual member states (e.g. France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Belgium, and the Netherlands), others are grouped under Rest of EU-27;
LNG imports are available at the sub-region level: EU-27 South, EU-27 North West, and Rest of EU-27;
Some metrics – domestic production, pipeline imports, storage, and the balancing factor – are available at the total EU-27 level.
For simplicity, the API aggregates all of this by default into a single EU-27 balance, and it can be broken down on request. This is exposed through a split parameter:
fullBalance(default) returns the single merged EU-27 balance – one row per month, with all metrics aggregated into the headline supply/demand/storage equation;countryreturns the finest available granularity: demand per member state, LNG imports by sub-region, and the EU-27-wide metrics (domestic production, pipeline imports, storage, balancing factor) on the EU-27 entity itself – so the constituent rows still sum to the full EU-27 balance.
Defaulting to the merged balance keeps things simple by avoiding a mix of member-state, sub-regional, and EU-wide figures in the same view, while the country split is there for users who want to see the data at the level it is modelled.
Methodology – how the forecasts are made
A key point to understand about this product is that the forecasts are not time-series extrapolations of historical flows; they are built from fundamentals.
Supply: LNG supply is projected plant by plant, month by month, 18 months out, from bottom-up assumptions about each liquefaction facility – planned maintenance, ramp-up of new trains, and expected capacity additions as projects come online. This plant-level detail is exposed directly in the API (supply can be split down to individual liquefaction installations).
Demand: LNG demand is modelled country by country, using one of two approaches depending on how material and how data-rich each market is:
Top-down: for smaller demand centres with less data transparency, Kpler produces a direct country-level monthly LNG demand estimate;
Bottom-up: for the key markets, LNG demand is derived from a full natural gas balance – a sector-level gas-consumption forecast set against domestic production, pipeline imports/exports, storage, and LNG. In these markets, the LNG figure falls out of the wider gas balance, which is exactly why the product exposes those gas balances alongside the LNG view – they explain what is driving the changes in LNG demand.
This is also why the natural gas balances cover only a set of key economies: the full balance exists where a market is modelled bottom-up.
Per-country models: forecast models differ by country, using different input variables that reflect each market's distinct structure. This per-market modelling is the reason the metric sets are not uniform across geographies (see Important usage notes).
Important usage notes
Why are the natural gas balances not aggregated across countries in the API?
Different markets do not share the same set of metrics. As described above, each country's demand (and, to a lesser extent, supply) is resolved into the component categories that fit how that market actually works and how granular Kpler's coverage is there – the US carries lease & plant fuel and pipeline & distribution use, India carries city gas and fertilizer, while Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan split only power and non-power. Because the components don't line up from one country to the next, adding the balances together would not produce a coherent regional or global total – so the API keeps the natural gas balances disaggregated, rather than rolling them up.
Where a meaningful aggregate can be built, the product provides it directly: the EU-27 balance described above is the main example, constructed so that its constituent rows reconcile to the whole.
The product does not set out to be a full global natural gas balance at launch, and there is no single "global gas" figure to aggregate toward. Its value lies in linking the global LNG balance with the gas balances of the key markets that drive it, read country by country.
Accessing the data
The product is available via API, through two endpoints – one for the LNG balance and one for the natural gas balances:
/v2/supply-demand/lng/balances/v2/supply-demand/gas/balances
Full endpoint and field details, including the complete metric list, units, splits, and release metadata, are in the API specification in the Kpler Developer Portal, found below.
The LNG balance exposes three metrics – supply, demand, and balancingFactor. The natural gas balance exposes a richer set: total supply and demand, the demand and supply components described above (including demandLngFeedgas and supplyLngSendout/supplyLngImport), storage level and capacity, and the balancing factor. The two balances are distinct products (LNG and Gas) with their own release timestamps. Full field definitions and units are in the API specification.
Note for trial users
Trial accounts grant access to 3-month forecasts, rather than 18-month, based on the last release date. For example, trial accounts activated in June 2026 will include forecasts to September 2026.