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Japan Invests Big In LNG Despite Climate-Friendly Promises
Japan is one of the world’s biggest public financiers of gas and oil production, despite a pledge to halt all such funding for fossil fuel at the G7 summit in 2022.
From 2013 to 2024, Japanese public financial institutions provided $93 billion (€82 billion) worth of investments for oil and gas projects, according to a report from the South Korea-based Solutions for Our Climate (SFOC). Overseas liquefied natural gas (LNG) development projects amounted to $56 billion worth of this financing.
In the same period, the report estimates $24.5 billion in funding was provided for clean energy projects.
“Japan’s international influence in energy financing, and specifically fossil fuel financing, is enormous,” Walter James, a private consultant focusing on Japan’s climate and energy policies, told DW
“It’s really across the fossil fuel supply chain … all the way from exploration, production, transportation to actual use and power plants.”
In what the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA), a US-based research center, calls the “Japanese model” of LNG investment, decades of policy development by Japan to “encourage direct overseas investment in LNG export projects,” have turned Japan into the main driver of LNG development in the Asia Pacific.
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