QatarEnergy has become the largest buyer of liquefied natural gas from the United States, the producer that overtook Qatar as the world’s top LNG exporter earlier this decade. The Qatari state firm signed two agreements with Cheniere Energy in October to buy up to 4 million tonnes a year from the Sabine Pass and Corpus Christi plants, with deliveries expected to begin in 2031 and continue through 2054, and a further agreement to buy 3 million tonnes a year from Woodside Energy’s Louisiana LNG project, on a free on board basis from 2030 for 20 years.
The reason is the war. Iranian missile attacks in March took out 17 percent of Qatar’s export capacity, which QatarEnergy put at an estimated 20 billion dollars in lost annual revenue, and seven months later only a few cargoes are moving through the Strait of Hormuz. QatarEnergy has declared force majeure on some long term contracts for up to five years and last week extended it by another month, through the end of December 2026.
Chief executive Saad Sherida Al-Kaabi said the US purchases put the company in a stronger position to meet growing global LNG demand, and QatarEnergy has said it can resume normal operations within a few weeks of Hormuz reopening. Wood Mackenzie, cited by the Financial Times, expects QatarEnergy to control 23.7 million tonnes a year of US LNG by 2033 once the new deals and its 70 percent stake in the Golden Pass export plant in Texas are counted, more than any other buyer, with the gas resold to customers elsewhere rather than shipped to Qatar.
The structure is the signal. Qatar built its position on the reliability of term deliveries from a single export complex on a single strait. It is now paying a rival exporter for portfolio supply that does not pass through Hormuz, which is an admission, in contract form, that the chokepoint risk is being priced as permanent rather than temporary.