I was poking around a little bit after my post on the
price of diesel thread and it seems all the major oil companies and gas exporters are building or planning to build plants to convert natural gas to synthetic diesel.
It looks to me as if LNG is going to end up as a very small niche market. Unlike LNG, you can easily sell diesel anywhere, and shipping it all over the world is routine and much less controversial than LNG.
For
example, Shell is building a big plant in Qatar.
Why bother exporting LNG when you can turn natural gas into easy to ship value added products like fuels and fertilizers?