Qatar's LNG resurgence

The country is expanding its liquefied natural gas export capacity

It was in April 2017 that Qatar Petroleum's chief executive, Saad al-Kaabi, made the announcement that many in the LNG industry had been awaiting for more than a decade. The moratorium on new projects utilising North Field gas, imposed in April 2005, was to be lifted. Only in recent weeks, however, has the full scale of Qatar's renewed LNG ambitions become apparent. The initial assumption that Qatar might just be implementing a long-awaited debottlenecking of its six mega-trains—to yield an extra 12m tonnes a year or so of production capacity—has long been swept away. It is now clear that Qatar is planning a second major LNG production complex, of up to 31m t/y, to supplement its existing na