Kitimat suppliers face cost-focused owners as Blackstone buys into LNG Canada for $1.6B

What’s happened.

Mitsubishi Corp said on Monday it will sell a 49.9% interest in the holding company that owns its 15% stake in LNG Canada to funds managed by Blackstone Credit & Insurance, a unit of Blackstone, for about $1.6 billion. LNG Canada is the Shell-led export plant at Kitimat, British Columbia, that started production in June 2025. The deal is expected to close in November, a Mitsubishi spokesperson said, and the company says it will not change its LNG offtake volumes or customer relationships. The full report is at BOE Report.

The timing matters more than the price. Shell and its partners announced the final investment decision on LNG Canada Phase 2 in September, a build that doubles the plant to 28 million tonnes of liquefied natural gas a year. Mitsubishi’s holding company currently takes 2.1 million tonnes a year from the project and expects that to double to 4.2 million tonnes once the expansion runs. Mitsubishi said plainly that it will use Blackstone’s money to help advance the expansion while improving the capital efficiency of its investment — in plain terms, it wants the same stake to tie up less of its own cash.

For companies that sell into the gas chain that feeds Kitimat, from Montney wellsite work through processing plants and pipeline services to module fabrication, the owner group behind the single largest gas export build in Canada now includes a large investment manager alongside the trading house. Investment funds buy for returns on a schedule, and they ask harder questions about cost per unit, change orders and delivery dates than partners who are buying gas for their own customers.