Day rates for chartering an LNG carrier — the ships that move liquefied natural gas between exporting and importing countries. Rates spike when new export capacity outpaces new ship supply, and collapse when the opposite happens, since building a carrier takes years.
A new LNG carrier costs roughly $200-250 million and takes two to three years to build in a handful of specialized shipyards. When new liquefaction terminals come online faster than new ships are delivered, charter rates can multiply within a single winter. The reverse — a wave of newbuild deliveries arriving into flat demand — has historically driven rates down just as sharply.
LNG freight has a strong seasonal component layered on the structural cycle: rates typically firm into the northern-hemisphere winter as heating demand pulls cargoes toward Europe and Asia, then soften in shoulder months. That means the signal needs to be read against the calendar, not just the trend, when judging whether a move reflects the underlying supply/demand balance or simple seasonality.
Rates near the buy threshold generally reflect a fleet surplus from recent newbuild deliveries — painful for shipowners today, but historically the setup that precedes the next tightening once ordering slows. Rates pushing into the sell zone reflect a genuine shortage of ships relative to export capacity, which owners eventually answer by ordering more vessels, sowing the next oversupply.
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