FT - The 25-year deal with China National Petroleum Corporation means Cheniere has pulled ahead in the race to develop a new wave of US LNG export projects to come on stream in the 2020s.

“Our goal is to sell LNG,” she said. “We’re happy to help local developers by investing in infrastructure if it helps the market grow.”

“We're interested in seeing more interconnected markets in Europe. We obviously can deliver very flexibly to any terminal; we're not bound into delivering to just one location, as you would be with a pipeline, and what we're really interested in doing is securing new markets, developing integrated projects possibly involving power plants as well, or floating re-gas infrastructure with a power plant behind it, a business model we've operated in Chile; we're looking at doing something similar in Croatia,”

The first phase of the Sabine Pass project will cost more than $12 billion and seemed unlikely after Cheniere bet the wrong way on the U.S. natural gas market