Track 7 of 7
Reading the data
What a tracker can and cannot tell you: what each project status means, why capacity figures disagree between sources, and how to cite this site responsibly.
Every figure on this site comes from someone else’s compilation of public sources, and compilations have grain. A status is a judgement about a project made on a particular day; a capacity is whatever the most recent credible source said; an ownership share is a snapshot of an arrangement that may already have changed.
None of that makes the data unreliable. It makes it data rather than truth, and the difference matters when you build an analysis on top of it. The most common mistakes are adding proposed capacity to operating capacity, treating a reclassification as an event in the world, and comparing two sources that measure different things with the same word.
This track explains the conventions used here, so that a number taken from this site can be defended by whoever takes it.
5 modules
All written.
- 01What terminal status actually means
A project status describes how far an LNG terminal or train has progressed, and the gap between proposed and operating is the single most misread number in the industry.
- 02Why capacity figures disagree between sources
LNG capacity figures disagree between sources mainly because of differing unit conventions, differing project statuses included in a total, nameplate against actual output, and how tracker compilers resolve conflicting primary sources.
- 03Ownership, parents and why they differ
Ownership, operatorship and parent-company control are three distinct relationships an LNG asset can have with a firm, and a tracker recording all three separately is describing three different kinds of influence, not redundant detail.
- 04What a tracker can and cannot tell you
An infrastructure tracker like the Global Gas Infrastructure Tracker reports what public sources say about a project at a point in time, which is a different and narrower thing than reporting what is objectively true about the project right now.
- 05How to cite this site, and what to check first
Citing this site correctly means attributing the underlying Global Gas Infrastructure Tracker data to Global Energy Monitor by name and release, while separately attributing any grouping, computation or written explanation original to this site.
Vocabulary for this track
8 terms, defined in full in the glossary.