Insurers backing LNG
Why do insurers matter in LNG expansion?
Insurance companies play a crucial role in enabling LNG expansion. Without insurance coverage, new pipelines and LNG terminals cannot be built — and existing facilities would be forced to shut down.
There is now evidence of the impact insurance campaigning has had on the coal industry: in June 2025, a paper from the University of Zurich provided the first academic evidence that the underwriting policies of insurers have had a “significant and sustained” impact on the operations of coal mines. This highlights the role insurers could have on LNG expansion – exclusion policies could directly affect the building of new LNG terminals.
At the same time as supporting LNG expansion, insurers are pushing up the cost of premiums and withdrawing from parts of the world hit hardest by extreme weather – which is made much more likely by burning fossil fuels like fossil gas. In the US, insurers cancelled more than two million homeowners’ policies over a five-year period in the face of rising climate risks.
Top backers of LNG among major global insurers
Comprehensive data does not exist for insurance contracts. Insurance certificates (essentially a summary of an insurance policy) and court filings obtained via public records requests reveal the top insurers backing 12 existing and proposed US LNG terminals (see methodology). This research was done by Rainforest Action Network (RAN). Some of these initial findings were first published in Risk Exposure in 2024 and later updated in 2025 in Sacrifice Zones.
*These insurers are also among the top 15 largest global recipients of direct premiums from midstream (including LNG) and downstream oil and gas.
Lloyd’s of London is an insurance marketplace, within which syndicates write insurance. It is the world’s single largest global center for fossil fuel insurance. These syndicates are controlled by managing agents, many of which are subsidiaries of global insurance companies. Lloyd’s has some regulatory powers over its market.
In addition, some insurers are increasingly playing a bigger role in financing. For example, AIG and Allianz are acting as managing agents for the Rio Grande LNG project, and Allianz holds a significant indirect stake (15.1% common equity) in Venture Global LNG (Calcasieu Pass LNG) through its subsidiary PIMCO.
Assessment of the policies of the 30 largest insurers
The assessment is based on a four-degree color code:
- Red meaning « no commitment ».
- Orange meaning « weak commitment ».
- Yellow meaning « incomplete commitment ».
- Green meaning « robust commitment ».
Two categories of commitment are considered:
- Project-related commitments (direct/project financing from a bank).
- Corporate-level commitments (general purpose financing from a bank).
Most insurers are failing to restrict LNG terminal coverage
Insurers have not advanced on ending insurance coverage of either LNG export or import terminals. Despite almost all insurance firms headquartered in Europe (except Lloyd’s of London) ruling out standalone insurance for new oil and gas field projects, none has yet ventured further down the oil and gas value chain. Most insurers recognize the need to restrict support to the oil and gas sector: 21 out of the 30 analyzed have adopted an oil and gas policy. However, the analysis also indicates that most of the policies have a very limited scope when it comes to LNG, meaning there is little impact on the LNG-related business of the insurers.
Generali is the only major insurer with a specific policy on LNG terminals. In October 2024, it committed to provide insurance coverage to midstream or downstream gas projects (transport, including liquefaction and regasification, and storage) only when projects support the energy transition in alignment with a 1.5°C pathway (for example, the criteria of the European taxonomy). In Generali’s own words, this means excluding coverage of projects carried out by “transition laggards” — a category that, so far, has no precise definition. Even though it remains unclear how the Italian insurer’s commitment will be implemented, Generali is ahead of its peers, given that most have yet to tackle coverage for all upstream oil and gas projects.