Data sources and licence

Global Energy Monitor's Global Gas Infrastructure Tracker catalogues gas transmission pipelines, LNG import and export terminals and, since December 2025, the LNG carrier fleet. GEM publishes the terminal and pipeline sets roughly annually and carriers quarterly. Each asset has a page on GEM.wiki, which we link as the "Full project history" source rather than reproducing.

Licence: CC BY 4.0. Every page that renders GEM data carries the line below, with the release month of the file it came from.

Country outlines on maps come from Natural Earth (1:110m Admin 0 Countries), which is public domain. Map rendering uses MapLibre GL JS served from this site; no tile provider is involved and no request leaves the site when you open a map.

What is and is not reported: see data coverage, which counts how many records report each field and names the fields that are wholly empty.

GEM's three trackers — LNG terminals, gas pipelines and LNG carriers — are each Excel workbooks behind a form that asks for a name and email address; there is no public API and no way for an unattended build to fetch them. We download each workbook by hand and commit it to this repository, which is what every build reads from — the only way to get a reproducible build without hitting that form on every deploy.

scripts/fetch-gem.ts is kept as a fallback for when a workbook is not yet on hand: it reads the thinner data GEM separately publishes to open repositories behind its own public map. That export carries fewer fields — no FLNG/FSRU flag, no FID dates, no per-unit Mtpa — and has never covered the carrier fleet at all, so it is used only until the real workbook can be downloaded. Fields the workbook does not report readNot reported here rather than being estimated.

• Grouping. GEM lists one row per train or phase. We group rows into one terminal page using GEM's terminal identifier, falling back to name + country.
• Status normalisation. GEM's status text is mapped to nine values: proposed, pre-construction, construction, operating, mothballed, idle, retired, cancelled, shelved. Unmapped text is shown verbatim and rendered as "Not reported".
• Capacity in both units. Mtpa and bcm/y are always shown together, converted at 1 Mtpa = 1.36 bcm/y when GEM gives only one.
• Company de-duplication. Owner, operator and parent names are folded into one company record per firm using a hand-maintained alias list; tickers and headquarters come from that list only.
• Templated summaries. The opening paragraph on each asset page is generated from fields by a fixed template, never by a language model, so it cannot say anything the data does not.
• Stable URLs. Slugs are stored against GEM identifiers so a renamed asset keeps its address; old slugs redirect.
• Route geometry. Pipeline routes are assembled from GEM's route file, spreadsheet coordinates or reported endpoints, and each segment says which. Lengths are measured from geometry only when GEM reports none.
• Pipeline ↔ terminal links. Computed by proximity within 25 km, labelled with the distance and the matching method.
• Carrier checks. IMO check digits are verified, containment and propulsion normalised into families, and sister ships inferred from yard, year and capacity.
• A change log. Each ingest is diffed against the previous release, and the differences are committed so the site keeps a history the tracker itself does not publish.
• Country profiles. Terminals, pipelines, fleet and companies gathered per country, with the import against export balance computed from operating capacity.

• We do not estimate, interpolate or infer missing values. An empty GEM field reads "Not reported".
• We do not reproduce GEM.wiki narrative text; we link to it.
• We do not show live vessel positions, voyages or AIS data. A carrier page describes the ship, not where it is, and carriers are deliberately absent from the map.
• We do not assert that a nearby pipeline serves a terminal. Proximity links carry their distance and matching method so you can judge them.
• Supplier and firm facts outside GEM's fields must each cite a public source or they are left out.