How One Strike on Qatar Flipped the Global Gas Market Into Deficit

For most of 2025, the consensus in global gas was that 2026 would belong to buyers. A record wave of new liquefied natural gas (LNG) projects in the United States, Qatar and Canada — roughly 93 million tonnes per annum (mtpa) of fresh capacity across 2025 and 2026 — was supposed to flood the market and push prices down. Then came the strikes on Qatar.

In early March 2026, attacks on the Ras Laffan industrial complex, the world's largest LNG hub, damaged two of Qatar's 14 liquefaction trains (reported as Trains 4 and 6) and one of its two gas-to-liquids facilities. The result, by QatarEnergy's own account, was the loss of about 12.8 mtpa of production — roughly 17% of Qatari LNG capacity — for an estimated three to five years. On around 24 March, QatarEnergy declared force majeure on long-term supply contracts to Italy, Belgium, South Korea and China.

What LNG actually is

Natural gas is mostly methane. To ship it across oceans, exporters chill it to about minus 162°C, shrinking it roughly 600 times into a liquid that fits in specialised tankers. The chilling happens in industrial units called liquefaction trains; at the destination it is regasified and piped to power plants and homes. Because building trains, tankers and import terminals takes years, LNG supply is slow to adjust — which is exactly why a sudden outage hits prices so hard.

Qatar is one of the three largest LNG exporters on earth, and Ras Laffan handles close to a fifth of global LNG. Damaged trains cannot simply be switched back on; they require specialised parts and rebuilding. Energy Minister Saad al-Kaabi told Reuters that Qatar could lose roughly $20 billion a year in revenue, with repairs estimated near $26 billion.

The price shock

Markets reacted immediately. On the first wave of news in early March, European benchmarks — Dutch TTF and British NBP — jumped roughly 50%, with intraday spikes near the largest single-day moves since the 2022 energy crisis. The Asian benchmark, the Japan-Korea-Marker (JKM), rose almost 39%. As the scale of the damage and the force majeure became clear, analysts at Kpler tracked prices up roughly 65% from pre-disruption levels, the highest since 2023.

The mechanics are brutal in their simplicity. Other exporters are already running flat out, so there is little spare capacity to backfill Qatar's barrels. With supply fixed, Europe and Asia bid against each other for the same scarce spot cargoes, and prices rise until enough demand is rationed away — through industry cutting output, utilities switching to coal, or buyers simply going without.

Who gets hurt the most

The pain is concentrated among import-dependent economies with little buffer:

• Pakistan sources close to all of its LNG from Qatar and buys heavily on the spot market, leaving it acutely exposed.
• Bangladesh relies on Qatar for roughly 70% of its LNG and competes for the same cargoes.
• Europe takes only about 8% of its gas directly from Qatar, but entered the crisis with storage near its lowest level since 2022, forcing more coal-fired generation and renewed competition with Asia.

About 90% of Qatari LNG normally heads to Asia, so the contractual hit lands hardest there — but because gas is a global market, a shortfall anywhere pushes prices everywhere.

From glut to deficit

The deeper story is the reversal. The supply wave that was meant to tip the market into oversupply has instead been swamped by the loss of low-cost Qatari volumes. By May, energy researchers cited by Enverus and Rigzone estimated the global LNG market had swung into a structural deficit of roughly 8 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d), with tightness expected to persist for years as repairs drag on and some Qatari capacity may stay offline closer to 2030.

What to watch

Repairs run in years, not weeks, so the key variables are how fast Qatar rebuilds the damaged trains, whether the broader regional conflict and the Strait of Hormuz — through which roughly a fifth of global LNG transits — stay open, and how quickly the new US and Canadian projects ramp. European storage levels heading into winter and demand discipline in price-sensitive Asia will determine whether prices ease or stay elevated. Many of these figures remain estimates from QatarEnergy and market analysts; the confirmed core is the damage, the force majeure and the price spikes. The rest depends on a repair timeline measured in years.