So we will be drawing down this inventory. And then once we’re getting into the spring, Europe will need to fill up it’s inventory levels again in order to be prepared for the next winter. So as I mentioned on last slide, Europe has had a huge demand destruction on the gas side, driven by these high prices. Demand in ’22 was down 12%. It’s been weak in 2023 but we do see some green shoes there on the graph on the right-hand side, we have in European gas demand bouncing back, driven by the residential and commercial sector. also driven by industry. We haven’t really seen it on the power side yet. So this is something we will monitor and we do expect low prices will affect consumer behavior. Looking at Emerging Asia, as I mentioned, there is some region where we demand really bouncing back.
Japan import on the weak side, China is up but we do see some of these other countries as mentioned but not only India, Thailand, very strong growth last year. Bangladesh in Pakistan which has been forced out of the market by these high prices are now returning and buying up more cargoes. And then the big item which has been recently is the U.S. moratorium on more export licenses. So U.S. has gone to become the biggest LNG exporter in a very short time. And actually, while exports now are at around 85 million tonnes with the projects in the pipeline in U.S. U.S. is set to almost double its exports from existing projects regardless of this decision. However, it’s unfortunate that we have this situation. Europe is still in desperate need of getting access to more LNG to kind of fill the gap from the Russian curtailment.
And of course, the rest of the world is also reliant on LNG in order to force out coal. The coal consumption is huge. If we are to do something with this, of course, renewable is a solution but LNG is certainly a solution to reducing the coal consumption. So there are a couple of projects in U.S. which has been more or less ready for FID this year and we mentioned some of the big projects there, Calsius plus 2 [ph], the Sabine expansion, both auto expansion like Charles [ph] who had a license to export but which were not allowed to renew it or extend it, so they have to apply for a new one. Commonwealth, Delfin and Freeport [ph]. So all of these projects now are [indiscernible] as former U.S. politician said all politics is local, this was [indiscernible].
So this is driven by, of course, Biden, have to reach out to the votes on the green side or the left side of his party in order to secure the election coming up in November. But for this project, it’s unfortunate. We do think that they will come back again regardless of whether it’s Mr. Trump or Mr. Biden wins the election because these are huge projects which are very important for their the allies, it’s very important for economy, creating jobs and these projects are ready to go once they get this permit from the Department of Energy to export to the countries buying these cargoes. So let’s look at the maritime inefficiencies again. So yesterday, I found up a new word: Cannibalism. So this is related to the fact we have had these issues with, first, Panama Canal did what really driven down the number of transit of LNG ships going via Panama, other ships are going for a safe good cap of good hope as also the fees in order to skip the queue in Panama have reached new highs.
We were all the way to about $4 million to skip the queue last autumn or actually more winter than autumn. So this has driven ships to rather go we are cap of good hope where you also have certainty on your schedule. And then lastly, now the Suez Canal where all traffic has gone given the onshore security situation there. So this has driven up cape Routing which, of course, is good for the ton mileage and absorption [ph] of shipping capacity. A bit more details on the Suez Canal. Of course, flows in the LNG market is more or less that what is being produced in Asia is being consumed in Asia. So the Australian Projects are going typically to Southeast Asia. And so the swing factor tends to be the American volumes which are flexible in nature.
But there are still the Qatar. Qatar is a big player, Qatar is exporting about 80 million tonnes, they will grow a lot with the new expansion projects they have so they sell quite a few cargoes to Europe. And if you are going, we are — Suez, it’s a big shortcut rather than going to a Cape of Good Hope which is the case today. Let’s dig into the shipping market. So here, we have a graph of the headline rates assessment for a modern tonnage two stroke. We can see on this line, the gray one being the rates achieved last year and the dark blue the average the last couple of years and then the light blue being this year so far. So we have the seasonal softness. We have seen all the other years and then the dotted line being the future freight rate.
So we do expect to market to find the bottom. And then as usual, we will have a seasonal peak once we are getting into, I would say, August, September typically then you see we do think that we are well positioned with Constellation, doing docking in Q2 and being ready in the market once it’s ready for take-off later in the year. And we could also have some summer rallies held depending on the price structure of LNG. If there is a contango [ph] which is often the case, we will have more buildup of floating storage and constellation is partially [indiscernible] very well fitted for such a trait. Average distance I mentioned a lot of the U.S. cargo has been going to Europe. Given Europe’s desperate need to get access to LNG which has reduced the distance being sailed.
But with prices now low and more demand from Asia, also the inefficiencies since Suez, we could see a better picture on the ton-miles going forward. Newbuilding prices has gone up a lot. As Knut mentioned, we contracted ships when they were cheap. So we have been contracting ships back in ’17, ’18, paying about $185 million per ship. Ship price today have fallen a bit from $265 million to $262 million. But if you take that number, it’s an increase in the price of a ship of $80 million. We have 13 ships so that’s $1 billion in appreciation of the ships since we contracted them. So we have a book equity of $860 million or so. If you add that appreciation, you are at value adjusted equity of $1.65 billion and our market cap today is around $1.5 billion.
So we do still think we have a very good kind of net asset value, protecting all assets and also backed by the charter backlog I mentioned. So these kind of high prices on the Newbuilding side also means that you need to have a higher rate in order to defend such investment. Keep in mind, interest rates gone from zero to also stabilized now today at around 4% on long-term interest rate which means that in order to build a new ship, contract a new ship and give a rate for our long-term charter, we see that rates are at around $100,000 per day which is substantially higher than the approximate $80,000 we achieved last year. So we do think we will find good opportunities to recontract of tonnage once it come open at better rates. We have seen softness in the shorter-term rates and we actually now have a contango structure in the term rates where longer-term charters are more expensive than shorter term, reflecting the fact that we have a lot of ships for delivery this year with a bit muted volume growth on the export side but which should give us a lot of opportunities to recontract ships because, as I show on this next slide, contracting of ships is, of course, tailing off the high prices and of course, a rather big order book already means that very few people are contracting on speculation.
Out of this order book, of around 300 ships, 93% is contracted towards a long-term contract and we see a little of any speculative Newbuilding contracting at all. And we do see the number of ships for delivering tailing off which fits very well with also the export story where a lot of volumes are coming to the market from ’25, ’26, ’27 and onwards. And once we have this smart in the U.S., we have a lot of projects ready to the FID which I think will happen, where start-up of these volumes will come from ’27, ’28, 429, when we also do have quite a lot of ships open. So another thing I’ve been talking about now for, yes, close more than 6 years is the technology change. So when we contract the ships back in ’17, ’18, we contracted the new type of ships.
It’s a 2-stroke engine, it’s a super-efficient ships. It’s about 60% more fuel efficient than the old steam turbine generation of ships. Those ships were contracted typically in the 1990s into 2000 against a 20-year time charter. 20-year, maybe even 25-year time charter. And these ships are now rolling off those legacy contracts. And given the inefficiency of the ships, given the poor environmental profile of the ships. We see a few charters extending these ships. So we have about 24 steam turbine ships expected to be redelivered from a long-term contract this year, 25 next year 12 [ph]. So this replacement of old inefficient ships will result in more opportunities for modern tonnes in terms of fleet renewal by the charters. So as I mentioned, was 46-year-old ships being scrapped last year, 6 ships in total.
The year before, it was one, in ’21 when the market was super-hot, it was 7 ships. We will be into an age now where we will have double digits of scrapping of older tonnage because it’s overdue. The only reason it hasn’t happened is that these ships have been on long-term charters and not being in the spot market. And then let’s look at the export market I mentioned, a bit muted on the growth this year, given the uncertainty about Arctic LNG 2 and then from ’25, ’26, ’27 we will have a big growth of this export market. There are 70 million tonnes of ready projects also for FID, the Northfield Qatar project will, of course, go ahead regardless of what Biden is doing in the U.S. and I might even add further volumes. And then we do have this project in U.S. in limbo where we need to have a resolution on this moratorium before these projects can be greenlighted and adding further growth to the market.
