Who's Still Paying Floating?

Bangladesh paid triple eleven times; Pakistan's fifty gigawatts of prepaid sunlight ran through the blockade — the swap out of geopolitics is quoted below cost.

Somewhere inside the Persian Gulf, seven laden Qatari LNG carriers are still holding roughly five hundred and seventy thousand tonnes of cargo that cannot leave — cooled to minus one hundred and sixty-two degrees, boiling off a fraction of itself every day to stay liquid, waiting on a strait where tanker and gas-carrier crossings fell to thirty last week from ninety the week before.

The molecules exist. The contracts covering them exist.

What has stopped existing is the passage between the two, and every power ministry in Asia that built a grid on the assumption the passage was permanent is now learning what its electricity actually costs — JKM printed near twenty-one dollars per million British thermal units on Friday, up three quarters on the year.

• Dhaka has learned it most expensively.

• Bangladesh — a country that contracted its gas future on long-term supply agreements precisely to stay out of the spot market — went into that spot market eleven times this spring at close to three tim…