Qatar Rewrites Its Gas Playbook With Old Tankers and New Tactics

By Stephen Stapczynski, Priscila Azevedo Rocha, Salma El Wardany and Sing Yee Ong (Bloomberg) —

Six months into a war that sowed upheaval in the Persian Gulf, Qatar found itself stuck. By late August, even limited shipments from the gas heavyweight had all but stopped following a projectile attack on one of its tankers outside the Strait of Hormuz. Pressure was growing, not only from energy-starved clients but also from inside an economy built on regular deliveries.

Then senior executives at QatarEnergy saw a potential fix — Al Rayyan, one of the oldest vessels in the fleet.

Out in the calm waters of the Gulf, a few hours from the country’s coast, Al Rayyan’s captain had been idling for days when the order came through. With security assurances from the US Navy in hand, he was given the green light, but was told to sail out quietly, without transponders or lights. At the helm of a 29-year-old gas tanker — a dinosaur in a flotilla that includes some of the most expensive vessels in the world — the shipmaster would be testing a vital workaround.

It worked. The tanker slipped through and headed toward the port of Sohar in Oman on Sept. 10. A few days later, it was met by another Qatar-controlled vessel, the Al Mas’habiyyah, a state-of-the-art carrier built in 2025. The second ship would now carry the cargo of liquefied natural gas on to its final destination: China.

Al Rayyan headed back through Hormuz, for its next load.

Bloomberg News interviewed more than two dozen traders and officials to piece together Qatar’s efforts to steadily restore its position as a leading LNG exporter — until the war began, it was second only to the United States — even without a clear end in sight for the conflict between the US and Iran that has destabilized the region. Their accounts, provided under condition of anonymity given the sensitive nature of the issue, offer a glimpse into how a gas powerhouse has begun to adapt to a new and uncertain reality.

Qatar provided nearly a fifth of global LNG last year and so is closely monitored by traders and rival producers. A sustained recovery could ease strain in the market at a time when winter is approaching and prices are at their highest in years.

“It has to adapt in the near term. Its entire model is based on shipping huge volumes through the strait,” said Toby Copson, China-based managing partner at Davenport Energy, which trades oil and gas.  “If Qatar can establish a more regular export route, it would start to ease one of the biggest constraints on the global LNG market.”

QatarEnergy did not respond to Bloomberg queries.

Since the US war with Iran began disrupting shipments, all energy producers in the Gulf have been forced to find new ways to get fuel to customers across Asia and Europe. Large oil exporters and traders have increasingly turned to shuttle runs, which send laden “mother” vessels through the waterway — often older vessels, traveling without lights or transponders that usually aid navigation — to be met by “daughter” vessels waiting in the Gulf of Oman, ready to take the cargo, typically crude, to any destination.

Transfers at sea are far harder and costlier for LNG, a fuel that needs to be chilled to minus 162C (-260F) and pressurized. Moving it requires special, cryogenic hoses and trained crews. But with oil shipments flowing through the summer, executives around Saad Sherida Al-Kaabi, an industry veteran who serves as Qatar’s energy minister and QatarEnergy’s chief executive officer, were growing concerned, according to people with knowledge of the company’s strategy. They could see gas cargoes from the US replacing shipments for major clients like India, while China was stepping up efforts to diversify away from the Gulf.

With an economy built around LNG, Qatar’s needs are pressing. Every week that Ras Laffan’s operations are not exporting costs the country roughly $1 billion in lost sales, according to Bloomberg calculations based on current long-term deliver prices, a significant sum for a $200 billion economy. The International Monetary Fund estimates Qatar could suffer an contraction of 15.6% this year.

There was no alternative but to restart shipments, Al-Kaabi’s team decided — though other levers would be pulled simultaneously, including an expansion of trading operations in an effort to profit from the same dislocation that was hobbling the company.

After Al Rayyan’s run, exports through Hormuz cranked up. Over the four weeks that followed the first crossing, roughly 20 tankers carrying Qatari LNG exited Hormuz, according to ship-tracking data and people familiar with the operations, racing back once empty. Deliveries approached a third of prewar levels by the end of September, a speed that caught even customers off guard. Buyers, particularly in India, had written off Qatari deliveries after the difficulties of the first months and now had to scramble to make room for arrivals.

“It is absolutely a cornerstone for global energy security,” said Peter Clarke, senior vice president for LNG at ExxonMobil, which has a stake in the Ras Laffan export plant’s production trains, speaking in September around the time the country was ramping up its shipments. Qatar, he told an industry conference, would “continue to play a really important role.”

Still, attacks have not stopped —  a new wave last week targeted a tanker linked to QatarEnergy — testing the country’s resolve almost daily.

Qatar’s recovery effort began back in March, in the first days of the war and immediately after the vast Ras Laffan complex was struck. Missile and drone attacks forced the first interruption to supply in three decades of operation, pushing customers to scramble for replacements.

The upheaval posed an unprecedented threat for a producer that preferred to lock buyers, mostly in Asia and Europe, into decades-long contracts with strict terms and rigid pricing. Qatar’s reliability — until this year, it had never declared force majeure — meant it had been able to command a premium. But exports for the period between April and the end of September plunged almost 90% compared to the same six months last year.

From the start, the senior team was all too aware of the challenge, according to people familiar with the company.  Al-Kaabi began marshaling different segments of the company, all while accelerating efforts to trade and source gas far beyond the Persian Gulf. In the meantime, contract managers kept in constant touch with customers even when there were no updates, according to people involved in the calls, in an attempt to preserve the link between buyer and trusted long-term supplier. 

The first part of the plan was to lean on QatarEnergy Trading. Established in 2020, QET has long had a mandate to buy and sell LNG on the spot market and build supply positions outside the country. With prompt prices in Asia surging, the unit began accelerating purchases of American LNG — not simply to replace lost Qatari supply and keep up deliveries, but to sell to buyers at a profit.  

Bangladesh, struggling with energy shortages since the war began, was one such client. The trading arm, which has a long-term contract with Petrobangla, agreed to deliver shipments to help fill the gap left by Ras Laffan. Under the arrangement, Bangladesh paid a small discount to prevailing spot prices — driven to sky-high levels by the war — but the cargoes still sold at roughly twice the price of its much cheaper long-term contract. 

The same conversation is playing out across Europe and Asia, with QET hunting down supply and keeping itself in the equation — even if market conditions push prices higher. The unit is on track to handle more  than 15 million tons of LNG this year, according to a person familiar with its operations. That’s a fraction of the more than 70 million handled last year by Shell Plc, the world’s biggest LNG trader and a benchmark for Qatar’s ambitions, but a jump from the annual 10 million tons the company estimated it was handling in the middle of last year.

“QatarEnergy has what it takes to become a trader,”  said Jean-Christian Heintz, a former trading executive who’s now an independent consultant at Wideangle LNG. “They have the talent, the financial reputation and the rationale — sourcing replacement volumes to mitigate Hormuz.”

QatarEnergy is in advanced discussions with export projects in Louisiana and Texas to purchase millions of tons of LNG for years in order to expand its portfolio of supply, according to the people familiar with the matter. QET already sources gas from the US Golden Pass facility, primarily owned by QatarEnergy, which began operations this year and has been steadily ramping up output. 

This week, in a rare move, it offered Bangladesh a long-term LNG deal tied to its “international portfolio” — and not simply Ras Laffan.

“We are building our position,” Al-Kaabi told the Qatar Economic Forum in New York in September, laying out the company’s ambitious goals for itself. “In the very near future, we will be the largest LNG trader in the world by far.”

The prime aim, however, was still to sell Qatar’s own gas. Even in the early months, the company had tested the water with occasional crossings — until the LNG tanker was attacked in July while traversing Hormuz. The engine room was hit and caught fire. Al-Kaabi took the incident as his personal responsibility and suspended plans to increase exports and send more fuel through Hormuz, said people familiar with discussions at the time. Another tanker loaded with Qatari gas was struck at the end of that month.

But as weeks passed, executives watched neighboring oil producers shipping cargoes through Hormuz, and began to worry that Qatar would be left behind. To make matters worse, increasing flows from the US were replacing shipments for some of its major clients like India, and top buyer China was stepping up efforts to try and diversify away from the Gulf. 

Storage was also becoming a concern, as the country tried to keep the world’s largest LNG export plant in working order so that it could rapidly expand if the situation around Hormuz stabilized. Two of its 14 production trains were damaged by the March attack and could take about three years to fix. But that still left 83% of its operational capacity available to resume rapidly, and QatarEnergy had mobilized staff to make repairs within days, navigating around struck facilities with shrapnel still strewn about, according to people with knowledge of the situation.

To ensure a rapid ramp-up once Hormuz reopened — LNG need for extremely low temperatures makes restarts slow — Ras Laffan was already producing just enough, sending cargoes to Kuwait every month to allow three to four production trains to keep running at low rates. But exports still needed to pick up, and that meant testing shuttle runs.

The first step was to begin recalling the vessels that it had leased out early in the war, when crossings seemed impossible. Top of the list were those aged 15 years or more, according to people familiar with the planning — tankers for which insurers would charge more manageable premiums, compared to brand new vessels that can cost more than $300 million to replace. 

But there were not enough. Short of the vessels required to meet its target — loading around a shipment a day for delivery as far afield as China and Japan — Qatar began chartering tankers from third-party LNG shipowners, including Greece’s Maran Gas Maritime Inc., at freight rates about 10 times the market price at the time, according to sources involved in the trade.

That left a second problem: willing crews. Several countries, including the Philippines, have pushed back against allowing the use of their citizens to ferry cargoes through Hormuz. QatarEnergy worked instead with recruiters in Indonesia, offering double and sometimes triple the usual monthly pay, plus bonuses for sailing through the strait.

Qatar now needs to manage a final and far more challenging headache — the unpredictable nature of crossings and an unstable security situation. Since the attack last week, transits have slowed. All of that will mean different relations with the country’s clients.

 “Qatar’s ability to demand premium pricing and terms diminished,” said Saul Kavonic, senior energy analyst at MST Marquee. “Gulf states are rapidly looking to build pipelines and other avenues. Qatar is in the most difficult position as they have no avenues to bypass the strait for their LNG.”

It is possible that not all customers, for example, will wait for Qatar to ship in sufficient quantities. Extended force majeure can eventually give buyers the right to walk away, typically after a prolonged period of canceled deliveries. Some may well seek more flexible terms and conditions, according to people involved in the trade, forcing an LNG powerhouse to consider how far it will go to fit a new reality.

“There is no turning back,” said Anne-Sophie Corbeau, a researcher at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy and former head of gas analysis at BP Plc. “QatarEnergy will have to adapt, either through lower prices, or more flex or a combination of both.”

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