India LNG growth needs the right data platform
India is the world’s fourth-largest LNG importer, and that position is about to get more demanding.
The International Energy Agency’s India Gas Market Report projects LNG imports will reach 36 billion cubic metres in 2024. India’s LNG demand will reach 64 billion cubic metres a year by 2030, a growth of 11% annually, more than double that figure. Terminal capacity is expected to reach 87 million tonnes per annum by the end of the decade, with new regasification terminals commissioned on both coasts and the national gas grid extending further inland. And the gap between contracted supply and projected demand is set to widen after 2028, leaving operators more exposed to the spot market than at any point in the last decade.
This isn’t an India-only story. Deloitte’s 2026 Oil and Gas Industry Outlook places India’s growth within a global LNG demand curve projected to rise 60% by 2040. Operators that get their data foundations right now are building for a market that keeps expanding for the next fifteen years, not just the next five.
All of that growth puts pressure on the data underneath it.
The operational data challenge for LNG import terminals
Running an LNG import terminal is a data-heavy job, and it only gets more complicated as volumes grow. A single terminal has to manage cargo scheduling and nominations, coordinating vessel arrivals against berth and storage availability. It has to track inventory and boil-off gas, keeping tank levels, quality data, and losses reconciled against custody transfer records.
It has to schedule regasification, matching send-out rates to downstream pipeline and city gas distribution demand. It has to produce partner and joint venture reporting, where each stakeholder needs figures that tie back to the same underlying data. And it has to meet regulatory compliance reporting to bodies such as the Petroleum and Natural Gas Regulatory Board, on timelines that don’t move to suit an operator’s systems.
Get any of this wrong, and the consequences are commercial, contractual, and regulatory, not just an internal inconvenience.
Many Indian LNG operators still run these processes through manual work and spreadsheets built for a smaller, simpler operation. EY India’s work on digital operations in oil and gas makes the same point at sector level: the capabilities and infrastructure needed to run modern operations, cybersecurity, data management systems, and cloud technology are still being built out across much of the Indian energy sector. As terminals expand, new entrants arrive, and regulatory requirements tighten, the manual approach gets harder to sustain.
The deeper problem is structural. Traditional enterprise software needs a big upfront investment, a long implementation, and ongoing reliance on specialist developers for even small changes. In a market where spot cargo decisions get made quickly and the rules are still evolving, that lack of flexibility is a real constraint.
Why this isn’t a job for a fixed SaaS tool
It’s worth being precise about what actually solves this problem, because the terms get used loosely.
A SaaS product is one predefined piece of software. The vendor decides the workflows, the data model, and the features. You configure it within those limits, but the shape of the application stays fixed. That works well when most customers run the same process. It works badly when they don’t, and no two LNG terminals run cargo scheduling, commercial agreements, or reporting in quite the same way.
The difference plays out in three ways that matter for a terminal like this. A SaaS tool ships with the workflow built in, where a platform lets the configurator build the workflow the terminal actually needs. A SaaS tool changes on the vendor’s release schedule, where a platform changes when the business does, on its own timeline. And a SaaS tool treats every customer’s process as roughly the same, where a platform assumes, correctly, that no two terminals, joint ventures, or regulatory positions are identical.
EnergySys is a PaaS: a platform, not a finished application. It gives configurators the infrastructure, security, calculation engine, and toolkit to build the application that matches how a specific terminal operates. You can read more about why we build this way as a PaaS rather than a SaaS product.
That building is done through low-code configuration, using Excel-based logic domain experts already know. It isn’t no-code. There’s no drag-and-drop app that appears with zero setup. It’s a lower barrier to building than traditional software development, put directly in the hands of the people who understand cargo scheduling and commercial terms, not a finished product bought off a shelf. It’s also not a niche approach: Gartner projects the low-code development market to reach $44.5 billion by 2026, growing at a 19% compound annual rate, precisely because enterprises want the speed of configuration without losing control of how the system actually works.
For a market growing as fast as India’s LNG sector, that distinction matters more than it sounds. A SaaS tool built for someone else’s process is one more thing to work around. A platform built for the person who understands the asset is one they can shape as the market moves.
What the platform actually does for an LNG terminal
Each LNG terminal has its own cargo scheduling logic, commercial agreements, reporting obligations, and integration needs with pipelines, customers, and regulators. EnergySys’s LNG and gas management solution is built around exactly that variation, configured to reflect each terminal’s specific requirements rather than forcing every operator into the same shape.
Cargo scheduling and nominations sit alongside planning and forecasting tools, so send-out plans and inventory positions are built from the same governed data as everything else. Vessel and terminal safety checks can be run through the platform’s marine vetting solution, keeping that process auditable alongside cargo and commercial data rather than sitting in a separate, disconnected system.
Calculations are transparent and auditable throughout. Partner and regulatory reports come from the same underlying data, so there’s one version of the truth rather than several reconciled versions. When commercial arrangements or regulations change, the team configures the platform itself, rather than waiting on a developer.
That matters more in India’s LNG sector than almost anywhere else. The market is moving fast, terminals are scaling, and spot exposure is growing. The operators who manage that best will be the ones whose data keeps up.
Proven globally, and ready for India
The case for a configurable platform isn’t theoretical. EnergySys already runs some of the most complex LNG operations in the world, and the same platform that supports them is available to Indian operators today.
At Santos‘s GLNG joint venture in Queensland, EnergySys replaced a tangle of peripheral applications, local servers, and Excel models with a single PaaS solution. GLNG uses the platform to manage gas nominations, allocations, planning, trading, and LNG lifting data, and the implementation was delivered entirely in-house, with no consultants. Since go-live, GLNG has expanded its use of the platform into LNG marketing, gas marketing and optimisation, regulatory compliance, and scheduled report generation. Santos also runs a marine vetting solution on the same platform for their Gladstone LNG asset, evaluating vessels against safety protocols and international regulations before they ever reach the terminal.
The North West Shelf Lifting Coordinator (NWSOLC) coordinates LNG cargo scheduling and domestic gas nominations for one of the world’s largest LNG projects, on behalf of six joint venture participants who each need daily access to the same data. Their previous system was an opaque black box: slow, hard to trust, and impossible for the team to change themselves. On EnergySys, NWSOLC now manages long-term cargo forecasts, rolling 30-day schedules, pipeline nominations, spot cargoes, and weather-driven disruptions in one environment, with every participant able to see how a schedule was actually calculated. Scheduling time dropped from days to hours, and because the platform is low-code, NWSOLC’s own team makes changes to it directly, rather than waiting on the vendor.
Atlantic LNG runs four liquefaction trains at Point Fortin in Trinidad, with a combined capacity of around 14.8 million tonnes of LNG a year. Gas reaches the plant via three pipelines and a significant number of distinct streams, and each train has its own rules for allocating produced LNG and NGLs, including losses and fuel gas. Atlantic LNG’s team manages that entire nomination and allocation process on EnergySys, and a recent platform upgrade delivered a performance improvement of an order of magnitude on some of the heaviest calculations.
Between them, Santos, NWSOLC, and Atlantic LNG face the same problems Indian LNG terminals are scaling into now: multi-party joint ventures, cargo scheduling under pressure, regulatory reporting that can’t slip, and the need to adapt quickly when the market moves. None of that had to be solved from scratch. It’s already been solved, on the same platform, at a scale India’s terminals are growing towards.
Working with Quadface in India
Quadface is the EnergySys partner based in India. As a partner, Quadface sells both software and services under one contract, with first- and second-line support from Quadface directly and third-line platform support from EnergySys.
Founded in 2022 by Bhaskar Joshi and Prasad Deshpande, Quadface has a team of 26 specialists with backgrounds in hydrocarbon consulting, application management, production data management, and business analytics. They’ve delivered EnergySys implementations for operators in West Africa and are expanding across international markets, including India’s LNG sector.
Quadface also co-developed QWET, a well estimation template application built on the EnergySys platform. It replaces manual and spreadsheet-based approaches with a configurable, auditable system built around regression modelling. For operators managing large well counts across FPSO or complex onshore assets, it’s a significant step up from what most teams use today.
If your organisation is exploring a partner-led implementation in India, or you’re considering becoming an EnergySys partner in another market, Quadface’s model is a good reference point for how the partnership works in practice.
The case for India
India’s LNG infrastructure is scaling faster than the data management behind it. Terminals running below capacity today will need to run efficiently at full capacity tomorrow, with more partners, more spot cargoes, and more regulatory scrutiny. That is precisely the environment Santos, NWSOLC, and Atlantic LNG have already navigated, and it’s why the same platform choice makes sense here.
Operators who invest in a configurable, cloud-native platform now will be better placed to handle that growth, without the overhead of custom development, manual workarounds, or a system that can’t flex when the market does.
India’s LNG sector is at a turning point. The platform choices operators make now will shape how well they manage the decade ahead, and there is already a global track record to build on rather than a case that has to be made from first principles.
To talk through what this looks like for a specific terminal or portfolio, book a call with the EnergySys team.
