- The stock price of Tellurian Inc. (NASDAQ: TELL) increased by 25.29% on Friday January 15. This is why it happened.
The stock price of natural gas company Tellurian Inc. (NASDAQ: TELL) increased by 25.29% on Friday January 15. One of the triggers for the stock price increase was an interview with Tellurian’s co-founder and executive chairman Charif Souki, conducted by Harry Weber, senior natural gas writer at S&P Global Platts.
Souki told Weber in the interview that the demand for liquified natural gas did not see a drop in spite of the pandemic.
“I think it’s not unusual for everybody to wonder what was happening in March because there was pandemic, the impact on oil was absolutely devastating. However, there was no impact on natural gas or LNG on a global basis. And if you think about it, when people stay at home, they need more heating, they need more electricity. So it is logical, but nobody saw it in March,” said Souki. “I think by June, you were tending to recognize that LNG demand was not affected. LNG supply was affected simply because a lot of projects that were late finally started arriving, including in the United States, Cameron and Freeport, and that added a lot of unexpected supply or expected, but not quite in that timing. And at the same time, the psychology was very, very nervous about whether there would be an impact on gas demand or not. By June, we at Tellurian started warning people, be careful, there are things that are changing and it could happen very, very rapidly. I started warning people very early, this is going to happen.”
Demand for LNG has especially soared in countries like India and China. Those countries have been moving power generation away from coal-fired plants. And in the last few months, prices for fuel and shipping fees have been increasing due to colder weather in Asia and bottlenecks in shipments through the Panama Canal.
In a separate report, Souki told Reuters that that the company is targeting this summer to start construction of its $16.8 billion Driftwood LNG export project in Louisiana as the demand for LNG is surging worldwide.
“I hope that we will be in construction this summer,” explained Souki in an interview with Reuters. “There is a strong need for additional liquefaction capacity and we’re probably the project that is the closest to starting construction.”
And Souki pointed out that the global LNG demand is expected to increase by about 200 million tons over the next 7 years. Last year, global LNG demand hit a record high of 360 million tons.
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