Why geography decides everything
LNG is a seaborne trade, and the map does the rest. Where a cargo loads and where it discharges determines which narrow waters it must cross, and there are only a handful that matter.
Strait of Hormuz. Everything leaving the Persian Gulf passes through it. Qatar is one of the largest LNG exporters in the world, and it has no alternative route: there is no pipeline bypass for liquefied cargoes.
Strait of Malacca. The main artery between the Indian Ocean and East Asia. Cargoes from the Middle East, and many from the Atlantic taking the Suez route, converge here on their way to Japan, Korea, China and Taiwan. Deeper-draughted ships sometimes use Lombok and Makassar instead.
Suez Canal and Bab el-Mandeb. The short route between the Middle East and Europe, and between the Atlantic and Asia. The two function as a pair: a cargo using Suez from the Gulf also passes Bab el-Mandeb, so disruption at either has the same effect on the route.
Panama Canal. The short way from the US Gulf Coast to Asia. Unlike the others it is a managed asset with a finite number of daily slots, so it can be constrained by drought and scheduling rather than by conflict.
Cape of Good Hope. Not a chokepoint at all, but the alternative when Suez or Panama is unattractive. Its role in exposure analysis is as the pressure valve: available, but adding thousands of miles and weeks of voyage time.
The Atlantic basin is different
The most useful thing to understand about LNG chokepoint exposure is where it is absent.
A cargo from the US Gulf Coast to north-west Europe crosses open ocean and passes no chokepoint. So does one from Nigeria or Trinidad to Europe. That is a genuine structural difference between Atlantic-basin supply and Middle Eastern supply, and it is part of why buyers value the two differently beyond price.
It also means a single global figure for “share of LNG passing chokepoints” is close to meaningless. The number depends entirely on where cargoes are going, and cargoes move. The same US export terminal has zero chokepoint exposure serving Europe and passes the Panama Canal serving Japan.
Reading exposure without overstating it
When this site says a terminal is exposed to a chokepoint, it means something specific and limited: on a typical laden voyage to that destination market, a cargo would normally transit that point.
Three things it does not mean.
It is not measured. We do not hold vessel positions or voyage histories. The routing comes from a hand-maintained table of trade lanes, which is an editorial model of how cargoes normally travel.
It is not exclusive. A terminal serving several markets appears against several chokepoints, and its capacity is not divided between them. Adding capacity across chokepoints double-counts.
It is not risk. A route that has a good alternative is exposed but not especially vulnerable. A route with no alternative, like the Gulf through Hormuz, is a different proposition. Exposure is the first fact; the alternatives column beside it is the second.
What disruption actually does
The intuitive picture of a chokepoint closure is supply being cut off. Usually that is not what happens. Cargoes reroute.
The effect is on time. A Gulf cargo to Europe via the Cape rather than Suez adds roughly a week to ten days each way. Every ship on that route is then unavailable for longer, which means the same fleet delivers fewer cargoes a year. Effective shipping capacity falls even though no ship has been lost, and freight rates rise.
That is why chokepoint events show up in LNG markets as a shipping story before they show up as a supply story, and why the size of the fleet matters as much as the length of the diversion.
How this connects to the rest of the site
Every export terminal page carries an exposure panel showing the chokepoints on its usual routes by destination, with alternatives listed separately. Import terminal pages carry the reverse view: which chokepoints the cargoes reaching that region typically cross.
The routing table is deliberately visible and editable rather than hidden in code, because it is a judgement rather than a measurement, and judgements should be inspectable. There is also a machine-readable exposure feed, one entry per chokepoint listing the terminals and capacity that route through it, published so the sister Chokepoints site can consume it directly at its own build time.