Qatar is offering to take over Lebanon’s power supply problem at no upfront cost to Beirut. A draft program seen by Reuters has Qatar building two gas fired power plants within three years, with QatarEnergy supplying the gas under a 20 year LNG contract and private financing in place of Lebanese public money. The document leaves payment obligations and guarantees open for negotiation.
The National Integrated Energy Investment Program includes two 825 megawatt combined cycle plants, one at Deir Ammar in the north and one at Zahrani in the south. QatarEnergy would deliver gas through a floating storage and regasification unit with capacity of 3.5 million cubic meters a day, and through the Arab Gas Pipeline via Syria at 4.5 million cubic meters a day. The plan adds 800 megawatts of solar, 440 megawatts of wind, battery storage and 300 megawatts of power imports from Syria over two routes. A person familiar with the plan told Reuters the build out could take three years if both governments approve it quickly. Prime Minister Nawaf Salam said on Friday that Qatar would finance, run and operate the project, and that QatarEnergy and TotalEnergies would jointly develop a solar plant as the first stage.
The need is not in doubt. Lebanon’s state utility, Electricite du Liban, supplies only a few hours of power a day, private diesel generators provided about half of the country’s electricity at the start of 2026, and the economy is expected to shrink by 6 to 7 percent this year. The program would also extend Qatar’s power business in Syria, where a consortium led by Qatar’s UCC Holding signed concessions in November 2025 for 5,000 megawatts of generation.
The constraint is the gas itself. An Iranian missile strike on Ras Laffan on March 18 knocked out two of Qatar’s 14 LNG trains, QatarEnergy’s chief executive Saad al-Kaabi said last month that Qatar was producing a “very minute” volume of LNG, flows through Hormuz remain more than 75 percent below pre war levels, and QatarEnergy has extended its force majeure on deliveries every month since early March. The offer is therefore a claim on post war Qatari supply as much as a power plan: on Monday, a Qatari cargo loaded in August was sailing through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal toward Poland, a rare use of the shortest route to Europe.