Building a more resilient energy future for Bangladesh

A decade ago, Bangladesh faced a defining question. Domestic natural gas production was declining, energy demand was climbing, and the country's remarkable economic momentum depended on a reliable, affordable energy supply. The path forward was not obvious, and it was not easy.

Against this backdrop, floating LNG infrastructure emerged as an important component of Bangladesh's energy landscape. It enabled access to global natural gas supplies and has since played a significant role in supporting energy security and meeting the country's growing energy requirements.

Today, LNG infrastructure plays an important role in supporting the country's energy system and broader economic activity. Natural gas keeps garment factories running and export orders moving. It powers the fertilizer that supports domestic agriculture, the electricity that lights homes and hospitals, and the industrial base that has helped lift millions into a growing middle class. Reliable energy is not an abstraction here; it is the quiet foundation beneath one of the world's most compelling growth stories.

Excelerate has been privileged to be part of that journey from the beginning. We delivered Bangladesh's first LNG import terminal in 2018. As the company that pioneered floating regasification technology, we brought to the Bay of Bengal, one of the most demanding environments in the world, the same expertise we have applied across one of the largest FSRU fleets in operation globally. Since then, working alongside Petrobangla, government stakeholders, and local partners, our two floating assets in the Bay of Bengal have delivered approximately 1.9 trillion cubic feet of natural gas into Bangladesh, accounting for nearly 19% of the country's total natural gas supply since 2018. Today, those FSRUs supply roughly 1.1 billion cubic feet per day, about 34% of the nation's daily gas supply, with greater than 99% reliability since 2023. 

Those numbers reflect more than volume. They reflect a particular kind of infrastructure. Excelerate does not simply supply molecules to a market; we operate the critical last-mile infrastructure that moves energy from the global marketplace to where it is consumed, into the national grid, into industry, into communities. We take pride in serving the people of Bangladesh by helping provide the energy that supports homes, businesses, hospitals, agriculture, and economic opportunity. That downstream role, connecting global supply to local demand, is where reliability matters most, and it is where we have concentrated our expertise for more than two decades.

That focus also carries responsibility. Delivering a third of a nation's daily gas supply means holding ourselves to an exacting standard of operational excellence. We take that obligation seriously. The recent technical outage at the FSRU Excellence temporarily interrupted service, and our teams worked around the clock with our Bangladeshi partners to restore operations as quickly and as safely as possible. That experience underscores a broader truth about energy security: Resilience depends on redundancy. No single asset, supplier, fuel, or route should be expected to carry a country's needs alone.

Bangladesh's future energy security will not be built on any single fuel or asset. It will require domestic gas development, reliable LNG import infrastructure, renewables, regional power trade, efficiency, system redundancy, and nuclear power. But given the central role of gas in Bangladesh's power and industrial economy, LNG infrastructure will remain essential to keeping the system reliable while the country diversifies.

That truth points to the work still ahead. Bangladesh's domestic gas production continues to decline even as demand climbs, and the country's current import infrastructure, however reliable, leaves little margin. Meeting the nation's ambitions will require not only increased domestic gas exploration and production, but also additional floating LNG import capacity, greater redundancy, and deeper reach into the value chain. This is not a question of if, but of how quickly Bangladesh builds the resilient, affordable energy supply its economy will demand in the decade to come.

A broader partnership is also at work. American energy, technology, and expertise have helped build the modern infrastructure underpinning Bangladesh's growth, strengthening the economic ties between our two countries at a moment when that relationship carries real strategic weight. As trade and energy cooperation between the United States and Bangladesh deepens, reliable infrastructure will remain one of its most durable foundations.

The past decade has underscored the critical role of energy infrastructure in supporting Bangladesh's economic activity and energy security.  The next decade will require more depth in the system, more flexibility in supply, and more resilience against disruption — all while keeping energy affordable for the households, industries, and communities that depend on it. Excelerate is ready to keep working alongside Bangladesh to help build that future, practically, reliably, and for the long term.