International transport of gas on a large scale is hardly a new phenomenon; since 1970, especially, governments and private investors have chosen to build and operate ever-larger gas trade projects, involving both pipelines and trains of tankers hauling LNG. This part of the book (chapters 2–10) looks to that historical experience to glean useful lessons about the factors that determine where governments and private firms have built international gas projects. In Part III, (chapters 11–13) we look to the future, building on our insights on the factors that affect expansion of gas trade infrastructures with economic models to project the development of global gas trade over the coming decades.

In probing history, we have focused on projects that extend outside the sphere of the advanced industrialized nations. If gasifying the world involved building more projects such as the pipelines that export gas from Canada to the United States, or from Norway and the Netherlands to the rest of Europe, the barriers to gasification and the geopolitical consequences of new interconnections would be few. Governments and firms have demonstrated ample interest in building and managing risks in such projects, and the advanced industrialized nations are already richly interconnected in myriad ways. What makes the shift to gas challenging – and potentially seismic in geopolitical importance – is that it requires securing supplies that originate in, cross and arrive in countries where contracts are difficult to enforce, regulatory systems are immature, and investors have been wary in deploying capital.