Monocle globalist podcast today had some interesting insight into this. There are a number of reasons but one that I hadn't heard before is that they've been increasing their infrastructure for capacity so that they can pump as much as possible as soon as possible because they think we're close to peak oil and at some point demand will begin dropping.

Pot committed and alternatives don't look tempting enough on switching costs. What other play do they have?

https://web.archive.org/web/20260430140929/https://serjaimel...

(Archive.is doesn't work for economist.com, so what I did was log in with a free account, use single page and then uploaded it to archive.org using Htmlpipe which is an open source project I have made)

Hope this helps, Now I am going back to reading the article as I haven't read it.

Paywalled.

smart move