The Gas Imperative

The world is obsessed with oil.

Every geopolitical crisis produces the same reflex: watch Brent, calculate how many barrels might disappear, look at spare capacity and ask what it means for inflation.

It is understandable. Oil remains the world’s dominant traded energy commodity. It fuels transport, lubricates industry and provides the feedstock for an enormous petrochemical complex.

But looking at the world through an oil-price lens increasingly misses something more important.

Oil is just the biggest and not by much, and while oil does have important by-products, increasingly gas and its by-products and practical applications as an energy source is as important if not more important that oil.

First let me give you the breakdown according to the International Energy Association about global consumption in 2025, it might surprise you:

• Oil / Petroleum: ~29% – 31%

• Coal: ~27%

• Natural Gas: ~24% – 25%

• Hydroelectric Power: ~7%

• Renewables (Solar, Wind, Bioenergy, Geothermal): ~6%

• Nuclear Power: ~4%

  The Relationship between Energy and Materials

Energy produces materials. Materials produce energy. But which form of energy matters. Energy from gas determines where an ever increasing proportion of the worlds aluminium, fertiliser, steel and chemicals can economically be manufactured. Gas processing produces industrial raw materials that mining, agriculture and technology cannot function without.

This is the central argument of The Mineral Imperative: there is no digital economy, energy transition, food system, defence industry or advanced manufacturing economy floating somewhere above the physical world. Everything ultimately rests upon mines, molecules, electricity, processing plants and infrastructure.

The AI revolution is not being powered primarily by solar panels or wind turbines. Today, it is being powered largely by natural gas. More than 40% of the electricity consumed by U.S. data centres comes from gas, and it is expected to remain the largest source of new power for AI infrastructure through the end of the decade

And few commodities demonstrate that interconnectedness better than natural gas.

We tend to regard gas as oil’s cheaper, less glamorous cousin: something we burn for electricity, heating and industrial heat.

That is vastly too simplistic.

Gas generates roughly 22% of global electricity. World consumption is now more than 4.2 trillion cubic metres a year. But even those enormous numbers understate its importance because they count gas primarily as energy rather than as an industrial raw material.

Gas is also the feedstock for fertiliser. It is a source of helium. It produces ethane and natural-gas liquids that feed the plastics industry. Sour-gas processing produces sulphur, which becomes sulphuric acid, one of the most important chemicals in both mining and agriculture. Cheap gas also powers some of the world’s largest aluminium smelters. Gas produces methanol and synthetic fuels. Condensates flow into petrochemical systems.

So a disruption in the gas system does not remain a gas-market disruption.

It can become simultaneously an electricity shock, fertiliser shock, food shock, plastics shock, helium shock (which means a semi conductor shock), aluminium shock and mining-cost shock.

That is why gas, in some respects, may be more strategically important than oil.

Gas is not oil

The gas market is much more complicated than the oil market. The first mistake is assuming that the gas market works like the oil market.

Oil is remarkably fungible. Different crude grades command different prices, but a barrel can be loaded onto a tanker and moved around the world relatively easily. Geography affects freight and refining economics, but an enormous global infrastructure exists to connect producers and consumers.

Gas is fundamentally different.

At ambient temperature methane is an extremely low-density fuel. Moving large quantities therefore requires either a pipeline connecting producer and customer, or an LNG system that cools natural gas to around –162°C, shrinking it to roughly one-six-hundredth of its gaseous volume so it can travel aboard specialised cryogenic ships.

That changes everything.

An oil field with access to a port is potentially connected to the world.

A gas field may be enormous and still economically stranded.

Monetising it can require gas gathering systems, treatment plants, pipelines, compression, multi-billion-dollar liquefaction trains, LNG storage tanks, specialised ships, receiving terminals, re-gasification infrastructure, creditworthy buyers and often twenty-year contracts.

Which is why gas reserves are not the same thing as gas power.

Russia holds roughly 22% of proved global reserves. Iran around 16%. Qatar around 11%. The United States has less than 8%.

Yet America produces roughly a quarter of the world’s gas and became the world’s largest LNG exporter. Iran, despite possessing the world’s second-largest reserves and being its third-largest producer, represents less than 1% of international gas trade.

The geology didn’t determine that outcome.

Infrastructure, capital, technology, contracts and access to markets did.

This is precisely the same lesson the critical-minerals industry repeatedly has to relearn. Owning an orebody does not mean owning a supply chain. A rare-earth deposit without separation capacity is not rare-earth independence. A lithium resource without processing capacity is not battery security.

Likewise, gas in the ground is not necessarily an energy asset.

It is an option on one.

There isn’t really a global gas price

That infrastructure constraint also creates something almost unimaginable in oil: radically different prices for essentially the same molecule.

In early August the source article recorded US Henry Hub at around $2.77/MMBtu, Dutch TTF at approximately $18 and Asian JKM around $22.

The same methane was therefore worth approximately eight times as much in Asia as in the United States.

That price differential explains a huge amount of the industrial geography of the world.

Where gas is abundant and difficult to export, countries have an incentive not merely to sell gas, but to turn cheap molecules into higher-value products.

Which brings us to the part of the gas market that conventional energy analysis frequently overlooks.

The real gas value chain

Think of the global gas economy as several overlapping markets.

At the top is the commodity everyone recognises: natural gas itself.

More than 4.2 trillion cubic metres is consumed annually. Most never enters international trade. It travels through domestic and cross-border pipelines and is consumed in electricity generation, buildings and industry.

Then comes LNG.

Global LNG trade reached roughly 437 million tonnes in 2025, with the United States, Qatar and Australia alone supplying around 62% of exports.

At a representative LNG value of perhaps $10–12/MMBtu, that volume alone corresponds very approximately to $225–275 billion of gas changing hands annually before downstream transformation. It is an indicative commodity value rather than an official market-size statistic—the gas market has no single global benchmark—but it gives a sense of scale.

Then the tree branches.

Because what comes from a gas field is often not simply methane.

Gas processing can separate ethane, propane, butane, condensate, helium and sulphur (which becomes sulphuric acid the worlds most important industrial chemical), while methane itself becomes the feedstock or energy source for ammonia, urea, methanol, hydrogen, synthetic fuels, petrochemicals and metals.

A major Gulf gas development is therefore better understood as an industrial ecosystem built around a hydrocarbon reservoir.

Qatar’s North Field East expansion illustrates this beautifully. Its planned output includes approximately 32.6 million tonnes of LNG annually, but also around 1.5 Mt of ethane, 4 Mt of LPG, 250,000 barrels per day of condensate and 5,000 tonnes of helium.

Calling those outputs “by-products” makes them sound economically incidental.

They aren’t.

They connect natural gas directly into several of the world’s most important supply chains.

Gas feeds the world

Start with fertiliser.

More than 70% of global ammonia production is based on natural-gas steam reforming, consuming around 170 billion cubic metres of gas annually—roughly one-fifth of all industrial gas demand.

Ammonia becomes nitrogen fertiliser, particularly urea. It is am accepted statistic that ammonia by itself grows 50% of the worlds food.

Natural gas is effectively one of the raw materials from which modern agricultural productivity is manufactured.

Cheap gas historically pulled ammonia and urea production towards the Gulf, Russia, Trinidad, Algeria and other gas-rich regions because feedstock economics dominate production costs.

Global ammonia is therefore not merely a chemical market. At typical commodity prices, its annual output represents a market of tens of billions of dollars, while the downstream fertiliser industry is larger again.

But its real value cannot be measured solely in dollars.

Without nitrogen fertiliser, agricultural yields fall.

So gas prices eventually become food prices.

And Gulf sulphur feeds both farms and mines

There is another connection that is even less widely understood.

Sulphur.

Sulphur is recovered in enormous quantities from the desulphurisation of oil and particularly sour natural gas. Much of today’s sulphur supply is therefore not mined deliberately: it exists because the hydrocarbon industry must remove sulphur compounds while processing fuels.

Its overwhelmingly important derivative is sulphuric acid.

The US Geological Survey describes sulphuric acid as one of the most important industrial raw materials in the world and notes that its consumption has historically been regarded as an indicator of industrial development.

That matters enormously from a Mineral Imperative perspective because sulphuric acid connects the gas industry directly to mining and agriculture.

It is used to convert phosphate rock into phosphate fertilisers. Historically, phosphate fertiliser alone has accounted for the majority of sulphur consumption.

But sulphuric acid is also fundamental across the metals industry.

It is used in copper heap leaching and solvent-extraction/electrowinning systems.

It is the core reagent in many nickel laterite HPAL plants.

It is used in uranium processing and in-situ recovery.

It appears across cobalt, zinc and other hydrometallurgical flowsheets.

In other words:

Sulphuric acid 50% of which is derived from sour gas in the Gulf affects over 50% copper nickel cobalt phosphate and uranium production, which affects the entire global battery industry, agricultural industry and nuclear industry, and every industry that uses batteries, food and nuclear energy…...you see where this is going.

Global sulphur production is about 84 million tonnes annually, with nearly half of internationally traded material moving through Hormuz in the disruption examined. Prices reportedly rose from around $173 to more than $530 per tonne during the shock.

At $173/t, 84 Mt represents roughly $15 billion of material.

At $530/t, it represents more than $44 billion.

But again, the nominal market value understates its strategic value because sulphur is the precursor to an acid without which much larger agricultural and mineral markets cannot function economically.

A $15 billion raw-material market can therefore influence hundreds of billions of dollars of downstream production.

That is exactly why looking only at one aspect of a commodity market size can be misleading.

Helium: a tiny market with enormous consequences

Helium demonstrates the same principle even more dramatically.

Helium is not manufactured economically at scale. Commercial supply is largely recovered from particular helium-rich natural gas streams.

World production is only around 190 million cubic metres, and four countries supply approximately 96% of it. Qatar alone accounts for roughly one-third.

The helium market is small compared with oil or LNG.

Its economic importance is not.

Liquid helium enables superconducting MRI magnets, semiconductor fabrication, advanced scientific equipment, fibre optics and aerospace applications.

A semiconductor fabrication plant does not particularly care whether the global helium market is worth $5 billion, $10 billion or $20 billion.

It cares whether helium arrives.

This is the difference between price importance and systems importance.

Critical-minerals analysis has to understand both.

Gas becomes plastics

The link continues into petrochemicals.

Natural gas liquids—particularly ethane—provide exceptionally cheap feedstock for ethylene crackers in the United States and Gulf.

Ethylene becomes polyethylene and countless other chemical products.

That cheap-gas advantage explains why US Gulf Coast and Middle Eastern petrochemical facilities can compete so effectively with European and Asian plants relying more heavily on naphtha.

Again, the hydrocarbon doesn’t necessarily leave the country labelled “natural gas.”

It leaves as resin, packaging, insulation, medical equipment, construction materials, automotive components and consumer products.

The energy has been transformed into material.

Gas also becomes metal

And perhaps nowhere is the relationship between energy and raw materials clearer than aluminium.

Primary aluminium is effectively electricity converted into metal.

Producing one tonne requires roughly 13–15 MWh of electricity, while the industry as a whole consumes around 1,000 TWh annually—about 4% of global electricity demand.

That is why aluminium smelters migrated towards exceptionally cheap and reliable power.

Hydroelectricity created aluminium industries in Canada, Norway and Iceland.

Coal created China’s.

And cheap natural gas created a major Gulf aluminium industry.

Six major Gulf smelters identified in the research are backed by roughly 15 GW of dedicated gas-fired generation. GCC producers made around 6.5 million tonnes of primary aluminium in 2025, close to one-fifth of production outside China.

The broader aluminium semi-finished-products market was estimated at around $265 billion in 2025.

So when a Gulf smelter exports aluminium to Europe, it is in a very real sense exporting natural gas without exporting gas.

Instead of liquefying methane, loading it onto a $200 million LNG carrier and shipping it through a re-gasification terminal, the producer burned the gas domestically, converted the electricity into aluminium and put the energy aboard an ordinary cargo vessel as metal.

Aluminium is an energy carrier masquerading as a raw material.

And that conceptual inversion is important.

The hidden gas exports

Once you see the system this way, national energy statistics become strangely incomplete.

Some gas leaves the Gulf as LNG.

Some becomes fertiliser.

Some becomes helium.

Some leaves Gulf producers as polyethylene.

Some leaves as aluminium.

Some generates electricity consumed domestically.

Some produces sulphur that eventually becomes sulphuric acid and leaches copper, nickel, uranium, and phosphate thousands of kilometres away.

Officially these are entirely different commodity markets.

Physically, they are related branches of the same resource system.

That is what makes today’s obsession with the oil price so inadequate.

Oil remains enormously important.

But Brent tells you surprisingly little about whether a semiconductor manufacturer can obtain helium, whether an Indian farmer will face higher urea prices, whether an Indonesian nickel plant can source sulphuric acid economically, whether the worlds largest fertiliser producers will have to curtail production, or whether a European buyer can obtain Gulf aluminium.

Those markets can be disrupted simultaneously by events originating in the same physical infrastructure.

The 2026 Gulf disruption provided an extraordinary real-world demonstration. LNG was affected, but so were LPG, condensate, helium, naphtha and sulphur. The research and analysis clearly describes one set of attacks severely affecting seven separate commodity markets.

That isn’t an LNG crisis.

It is a raw-materials-system crisis.

This is the Mineral Imperative

The Mineral Imperative is ultimately not about compiling a longer list of metals the world needs.

It is about recognising the physical architecture underneath the global economy.

Energy.

Minerals.

Chemicals.

Infrastructure.

Processing.

Transport.

They are not independent verticals.

They are a network.

Copper needs electricity to be mined, but electricity grids need copper.

Nickel processing can require sulphuric acid, while much of the sulphur required to manufacture that acid is recovered from fossil-fuel processing.

Natural gas produces fertiliser, while agriculture produces biomass increasingly expected to contribute to energy systems.

Cheap gas produces aluminium, while aluminium is essential to electricity transmission, transport and renewable-energy infrastructure.

Helium recovered from natural gas enables semiconductor manufacturing, while semiconductors increasingly control the power systems that produce and transport gas.

The chain loops back on itself again and again.

That is why resource security cannot be understood one commodity at a time.

And why watching oil alone tells us increasingly little about the vulnerability of the industrial system.

Oil is perhaps the world’s most visible commodity.

Natural gas may be one of its most interconnected.

Its true importance is not simply the trillions of cubic metres consumed each year or the hundreds of billions of dollars of LNG traded.

It is the enormous value of everything sitting downstream of it: electricity, food, fertiliser, aluminium, chemicals, plastics, medical technology, semiconductors—and the critical minerals upon which the next industrial era depends.

The lesson is much bigger than gas.

Energy and raw materials run the world.

And the more closely you look, the harder it becomes to tell where one ends and the other begins.

Remember this formula: energy + minerals + processing capacity = industrial power=economic power.

It is the formula for the future.