By Benoît Morenne

The world is in the throes of a significant energy shock for the second time in four years. Natural-gas exporter Venture Global is ready to reap the profits.

With an unorthodox business model that allows it to capitalize on global disruptions, Venture Global raked in billions of dollars in 2022 when Russia throttled gas deliveries to Europe and buyers sought new supplies. The windfall helped the company become the second-largest U.S. exporter of liquefied natural gas, after Cheniere Energy.

Now, Venture Global is positioned for a repeat scenario that could boost its ambition to not only surpass Cheniere, but also overtake Qatar, the tiny Middle Eastern nation that sits on some of the world's largest gas reserves and has become an LNG juggernaut.

The Strait of Hormuz remains closed to most tankers, which has clogged LNG flows, and Iran's missiles have crippled Qatar's facilities that liquefy and ship natural gas.

That has turned Venture Global's available cargoes into a hot commodity. Unlike Cheniere, which sells most of its cargoes under long-term contracts, Venture Global reserves a large share of its volumes for spot markets, where prices can fluctuate widely.

"[The] U.S. is a very secure, reliable supplier, and there's lots of gas in the United States, and there's an attractive permitting environment to continue to grow it," Venture Global Chief Executive Michael Sabel said on the sidelines of the S&P Global CERAWeek conference in Houston last month.

Venture Global, which went public last year and is valued at roughly $39 billion, has positioned its Gulf Coast terminals as the answer to Asian and European buyers thirsting for new volumes.

Shares in the company closed at $15.94 on Monday, up about 65% since the U.S. and Israel began to attack Iran in late February. That is more than double the company's share price in mid-December.

Venture Global has said that over 30% of its cargoes this year are available for sale on the spot market. If spot prices shoot higher, that can more than make up for the slimmer profit that the company garners from its long-term contracts, which it offers at a low cost.

It is a risky strategy -- but one that appears set to pay off again.

The Asian benchmark for LNG has nearly doubled since the war began. The European benchmark last week traded near $17 per million British thermal units, up from about $10.

"They keep getting bailed out by wars," said Louis Lazzara, head of research at investment firm Energy Income Partners. "They will make a lot of money off this."

Analysts at Goldman Sachs estimate Venture Global could book an extra $3 billion in earnings if European gas prices were $5 higher than what the analysts modeled for the remainder of the year.

The company's ascendance has established its co-founders, Sabel and Robert Pender, as industry titans. Together, they own about 80% of the company's shares, according to S&P Capital IQ; each of their stakes is currently valued at about $15.7 billion.

Sabel and Pender founded the company in 2013 with the idea to combine midsize, prefabricated LNG units into a new export terminal. They promised it would be cheaper and faster than competitors, which typically built refrigeration units on-site.

When the Russia-Ukraine conflict plunged Europe into an energy crisis, Venture Global sold spot cargoes to eager buyers -- and skipped long-term customers including Shell and BP. The company said it wasn't bound to serve them because its first plant wasn't fully operational. While the oil giants seethed, Venture Global said in initial-public-offering filings that it generated almost $7 billion in net income in 2022 and 2023 combined.

The company has been on a growth spurt since, in part thanks to the pro-fossil-fuel Trump administration. President Trump lifted a freeze that President Biden had imposed on LNG exports. Trump also licensed new projects -- including CP2, an LNG export terminal that Venture Global is building -- and demanded that allies such as Japan buy more natural gas as part of trade negotiations.

Venture Global, which employs former Trump administration officials, was a top contributor to the president's second inauguration with a $1 million donation, The Wall Street Journal reported. At a White House meeting last year touting corporate investments in the U.S., Trump mentioned an $18 billion investment by Venture Global in Louisiana and said it would work out well.

Venture Global now operates two large terminals on the Louisiana coast and is building a third in the state. Last year, it raised more than $33 billion, including debt and proceeds from its IPO, according to regulatory filings. It also signed eight, 20-year supply contracts with customers including Mitsui and Tokyo Gas of Japan and Spanish utility Naturgy Energy.

Venture Global was facing a set of challenges when the Iran war broke out. Some investors were concerned about the company's loss against BP in arbitration court and other pending claims that could end up costing billions of dollars. Venture Global has won cases against Shell and Spain's Repsol and settled with Italy's Edison and an undisclosed customer. Cases against Poland's Orlen and Portugal's Galp are ongoing.

Meanwhile, new LNG terminals were mushrooming on the Gulf Coast, and Qatar was on track to expand its export capacity more than 40% starting around midyear. The new plants caused concerns that a supply glut was about to depress prices for the next two to five years.

Instead, national oil company QatarEnergy has lost 17% of its export capacity for as long as five years after airstrikes on its Ras Laffan LNG hub, and it has said expansion projects would be delayed. Analysts and executives expect cargoes will be in short supply globally for the foreseeable future.

A risk for Venture Global is that higher prices and fears of further bottlenecks might deter Asian nations, a growth market for exporters, from signing new contracts. Sabel said he expected the disruption to be shorter than in 2022.

"What we're building, gas, is super important to the world portfolio and energy mix and low prices, reliable prices are super important to that," Sabel said.

Write to Benoît Morenne at benoit.morenne@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

April 07, 2026 05:00 ET (09:00 GMT)

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