Sovereign rows of the Our World in Data “Gas production by country” series (primary energy equivalent in TWh). Top 30 by most recent year. Aggregates excluded.
Chart ready. Press play to start.
How to use this chart
Play/Pause starts and stops the year-by-year animation, the year slider jumps to any year, and the speed selector (0.5×, 1×, 2×) changes playback speed. Each year shows the top 12 entries out of the 30 held in the dataset.
About this ranking
About this metric. “Natural Gas Production by Country (Time Series)” reformats data published by Our World in Data (OWID Grapher slug “gas-production-by-country”). Values are expressed in TWh of primary energy, and the series runs annually from 1900.
What to watch. Two moments. In 1985 five Soviet successor states appear at once and Russia lands directly in second place; from 2005 the United States line turns upward and roughly doubles in twenty years. Rewind to 1900 and only one line has a non-zero value at all.
Caveats. Output is measured in energy (TWh), not volume, so these figures will not line up with the cubic-metre totals national ministries publish — gas of different composition carries different energy per unit volume. And the jump in country count in 1985 is a change in how the data is divided, not a change in production.
Trends in the data
In 2025 the United States leads with 10,737 TWh, 27.2% of the 39,420 TWh produced by the 30 countries in the table. Adding Russia in second place at 6,094 TWh brings two countries to 42.7% of the total. Iran (2,648 TWh) and China (2,641 TWh) are all but level in third and fourth, followed by Canada at 2,062 TWh and Qatar at 1,835 TWh. Compared with coal, where China alone accounts for 52.7% of the top thirty, natural gas has two summits rather than one.
From 1900 until the early 1980s the leader here is always the United States: 1,928 TWh in 1950, 5,715 TWh in 1970, far ahead of everyone else. It would be wrong, though, to read that as American dominance of world gas. Soviet output does not enter this series until 1985, so for the whole earlier period there is simply no line to compare against. The blank space means “not visible under this division of the data”, not “not produced”. In 1985 the country count steps from 25 to 30 as Russia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan all appear together, with Russia arriving straight into second place at 4,249 TWh. Nothing was built between 1984 and 1985; what changed is the unit of accounting.
The United States line bottoms out at 4,894 TWh in 2005, second behind Russia at the time. It then climbs to 5,752 TWh in 2010, 7,403 TWh in 2015 — back in first place — and 10,737 TWh in 2025, 2.19 times the 2005 trough, and no other country rises anything like as steeply over those twenty years. The United Kingdom offers the opposite shape, and it is the clearest full rise-and-fall in the table: 109 TWh in 1970 (4th), a North Sea peak of 1,135 TWh in 2000 (4th), and 299 TWh in 2025 — 26% of the peak, down to 25th. In the coal ranking the same country drops out of the top thirty entirely; here it stays in, so the whole arc survives as one continuous line.
The steepest gain belongs to Qatar, from 65 TWh in 1990 (24th) to 1,835 TWh in 2025 (6th), a factor of 28. China went from 154 to 2,641 TWh, 18th to 4th, and Iran from 247 to 2,648 TWh. Israel was at zero in 2000, 31 TWh in 2010, and 259 TWh in 2025 (28th). Many countries, though, are now below their own peak: Trinidad and Tobago at 59% of it, Egypt 60%, and Uzbekistan, Mexico and India all at 66%. Russia peaked at 7,021 TWh in 2021 and sits at 87% of that. Coverage is 25 countries from 1900 to 1984 and 30 from 1985, and all 30 report a value in 2025 — unlike the coal series, no line breaks off at the right-hand edge.
Trivia quiz
Natural gas has almost no smell of its own. Why can you tell when it leaks?
Gas as produced is essentially odourless; suppliers add a trace of mercaptan, a sulphur compound, to give it the familiar rotten-egg smell. The practice dates from 18 March 1937, when untreated residue gas collected under a school in New London, Texas and exploded, killing close to 300 people because no one could smell it. Texas became the first state to require an odorant by law, and other states and federal rules followed within the year. (Source)
What is "associated gas", and why has so much of it been burned off?
Associated gas is natural gas that comes up as a by-product of oil production. At fields with no pipeline or processing route it cannot be sold, so for roughly 160 years the industry has burned it at the wellhead — flaring — partly for safety. In April 2015 the World Bank launched "Zero Routine Flaring by 2030", and 35 governments, together accounting for about 60% of global flaring, committed to ending the routine practice by that date. (Source)
When did it become possible to ship gas to countries no pipeline reaches?
The world's first commercial LNG cargo was delivered on 12 October 1964: loaded at Arzew in Algeria and carried to Canvey Island in the United Kingdom by the Methane Princess, the first purpose-built LNG tanker, launched in 1963. She and her sister ship Methane Progress served a fifteen-year import contract. Cooling gas to about minus 162°C turns it to liquid and shrinks its volume enough to move it by sea. (Source)