The nine states
This site maps every project onto one nine-value scale, so a terminal, a pipeline and a vessel can be compared on the same terms.
Proposed. Announced or in permitting, with no final investment decision. The widest and least reliable category.
Pre-construction. Committed, usually past a final investment decision or holding its permits, but no ground broken.
Construction. Being built. For an LNG train this means several years of work, module fabrication and commissioning ahead.
Operating. Producing or receiving cargoes commercially.
Idle. Built and capable, but not currently working. A market condition rather than a technical one.
Mothballed. Taken out of service deliberately and preserved so it could restart.
Shelved. A development paused indefinitely. Not built, not formally dead.
Cancelled. Abandoned before completion.
Retired. Permanently closed or dismantled.
Why the proposed number misleads
The most common error in LNG analysis is adding proposed capacity to operating capacity and presenting the total as what the world will have.
Proposed capacity has always exceeded what gets built, often by a wide margin. Projects are announced to test the market, secure acreage, attract partners or influence policy, and many never intend to reach construction. Others are real but lose their race for offtake contracts, because a buyer signs with a competitor and the project quietly stops.
The discipline is simple: never add across statuses without saying which ones. On every page here, operating, under construction and proposed capacities sit in separate columns and are never summed into a single headline. When a terminal shows nothing operating and a figure under construction, the summary sentence says exactly that rather than implying the site is dark.
Reading a multi-train terminal
A large export terminal is rarely in one state. It may have three trains operating, one commissioning, and three more approved but unbuilt. Describing it with one word loses precisely the information that matters.
Our approach is a rolled-up status plus the detail beneath it. The roll-up takes the most advanced state present, so a site with anything operating reads as operating. Below it, every train appears with its own status, capacity and start year. The capacity cards separate the three states so the shape of the project is visible at a glance.
The same logic applies to a country page. A country with nothing operating and a large project under construction is in a different position from one with neither, and the numbers should show that difference rather than hiding it behind a zero.
Where statuses come from and where they go wrong
We do not assign statuses ourselves. We map the tracker’s own wording onto the nine values above, case-insensitively, handling the qualifiers that appear in real data. Text we cannot map is preserved and displayed verbatim on the asset page, and the unit is shown as “Not reported” rather than being guessed into a bucket.
Two caveats are worth carrying. Status is a snapshot at a release date, and a tracker published annually will lag reality by up to a year for fast-moving projects; every page states the release it came from. And status is a judgement made by the data’s compilers, particularly for the boundary between shelved, cancelled and merely quiet.
You can browse everything by status, and each status page lists the terminals, pipelines and vessels in that state, sorted by size.