The US could miss a golden opportunity to cement its grip on the global gas market, the godfather of US LNG warns.

In just one decade, the US has gone from an LNG importer to the world’s top exporter. And while the market was starting to feel crowded with sellers prior to the war in Iran, now it’s facing a major shortfall because of the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz and heavy damage to Qatar’s Ras Laffan terminal. Between this year and 2034, the world will be short by at least 135 million metric tons of LNG, equal to nearly one-third of global pre-war production, according to a new forecast by S&P Global Energy. “We are not looking at a temporary bottleneck,” said Shankari Srinivasan, S&P’s vice president of global gas and LNG, but rather “a fundamental global supply shock.”

If anyone could have seen this coming, it might have been Charif Souki. The legendary restauranteur-turned-gas tycoon was behind the first LNG shipments to leave the US, a bet that had many analysts sniggering before he became, for a time, the country’s highest-paid CEO. Between the war and the global race to electrification, the world is desperate for more US gas, he told me this week. In turn, facing a crammed domestic market, the best chance for US gas producers to grow is overseas. Yet Souki was decidedly bearish about the prospect of building more LNG terminals, the business that made his fortune. The problem, he said, is Wall Street’s reaction to the shifting rules of the LNG market.

When Souki got his start, LNG terminals were managed similarly to pipelines, with long-term contracts between buyers and sellers. To private equity, that looked like a lucrative, low-risk deal. But as LNG’s popularity has exploded and many more global terminals have opened shop, it is increasingly traded on the spot market. That means more flexibility for both buyers and sellers, and juicy arbitrage for traders in the middle. It also means more risk — and that’s where financiers are losing the plot. “LNG is definitely capital-constrained,” Souki told me. “Private equity has a hard time deploying capital because they’re pursuing business models that aren’t designed for the kind of risk you need to take.”

Souki may have a bit of baggage in this area — he was forced out of both the LNG companies he founded in part due to disagreements with shareholders and lenders — but his view seems widely shared. In a survey of PE firms and their institutional investors this month by consulting firm Campbell Lutyens, investors ranked their appetite for LNG projects midway down a list of 20 energy subsectors, in between biogas and carbon capture. And Ben Dell, who straddles both worlds as co-founder of PE firm Kimmeridge and chairman of Commonwealth LNG, the country’s newest terminal, told me yesterday he agrees: “Raising capital to finance LNG is still extremely difficult, and it isn’t going to get easier.” The upshot, Souki said, is the risk of a disconnect between what global markets want, and what US infrastructure is capable of providing, with billions of dollars at stake.

Souki’s personal strategy is to move up the value chain; Phoenix Energy, his latest venture, is focused on gas drilling and domestic pipelines, leaving the headache of building and operating terminals to others (although it does still plan to use existing terminals to sell some gas abroad). He has also sworn off taking his new company public. But at the end of the day, he’s still bullish about the global dominance of US gas. “It’s coming with a lot of hesitation and a lot of pain,” he said. “But I have absolute confidence in the US. Now, it needs to go faster.”