“The pace follows the market and not the wishes of the U.S. government,” said Nikos Tsafos, president and chief analyst at the consultancy Enalytica. “No one is really out there fishing for new projects right now.”

The gas business is cyclical, and proponents say it is only a matter of time before demand picks up. China and India are increasingly turning to gas to replace coal and improve the air quality of their cities. Gas demand for transport is growing in Iran, Pakistan and Argentina. Germany has largely given up on nuclear power, and it needs natural gas to replace some of the lost power.

Some L.N.G. executives say that the global demand for gas will grow as more export and import terminals are built and that the United States will continue to have a cost advantage over other major producers, including Qatar and Russia, because of the abundance of American gas production.

“It’s been demonstrated over the last two years that when you have low natural gas prices, demand increases much faster than what people think,” said Charif Souki, chairman of Tellurian, a Houston company developing a $15 billion L.N.G. export project south of Lake Charles, La.

“The Trump administration has discovered the power of natural gas,” Mr. Souki added. “Today, we are the top gas producer in the world, and in another three or four years, we’ll be one of the top two gas exporters in the world, right up there with Russia.”

That is certainly what the Trump administration is hoping for, although its policies may not have much of an immediate impact.

“We could be and should be the largest exporter of L.N.G. in the world,” Mr. Cohn said at a Washington conference in April. He said the first thing the administration would do was issue a permit for an export facility in the Northwest, a reference to the Jordan Cove L.N.G. terminal in the Oregon port of Coos Bay, where a Canadian company, Veresen, has proposed to build.