Seventeen Percent
Published 4 October 2026
The number to remember from the gas side of this war is seventeen. It is easy to misuse, so here is exactly what it means.
18 to 20 March
Israeli strikes hit the South Pars and Asaluyeh area in Iran, and Iran retaliated with strikes on Gulf energy infrastructure, per the Reuters graphics and reporting summarised in its maps and charts of the war. Qatar was among the places hit. On 19 March, a Thursday, the QatarEnergy chief executive, Saad al-Kaabi, told Reuters that attacks had damaged two of Qatar's 14 LNG trains and one of its two gas-to-liquids facilities. That removed 12.8 million tonnes a year, around 17% of Qatar's LNG export capacity, for an estimated three to five years. He put lost revenue at $20 billion a year, and said no workers were wounded in those attacks, per Reuters.
The denominator matters. Seventeen percent is of Qatar's export capacity, not of global LNG supply. The damaged trains were also not the whole of Qatar's output problem. Qatar had already declared force majeure on its entire LNG output because of the broader shutdown. A damaged train is a multi-year outage. An undamaged train that cannot ship is a temporary one. Those are different problems with different cures.
What Europe paid
On the same day, the Dutch TTF front-month gas contract hit an intraday high of EUR 74 per megawatt-hour, the highest since January 2023, and prices had doubled since the war began, per a Reuters explainer on where the EU gets its gas. For scale, Argus put the front-month close on Friday 27 February at EUR 31.51. That is an intraday high against a close, so the doubling is a rough comparison, not a like-for-like one.
The afterlife of the outage
By June the picture sounded better, and by September it sounded worse again. On 16 June one Reuters source said undamaged Ras Laffan facilities could restart quickly and reach their available capacity within a month if flows reopened, in the report. That was a readiness claim, not proof that output returned. On 11 September Reuters reported that QatarEnergy was negotiating US LNG contracts through 2031 to replace lost volumes, with one source giving 2 to 3 million tonnes a year sought, and force majeure notices extended to November per industry contacts, in its story. Talks are not contracts, and the notice dates came from industry contacts, not a retrieved notice.
On 21 September al-Kaabi himself, quoted by Reuters, said Qatar was producing very little LNG, normal gas operations could resume within weeks once Hormuz reopened, damaged LNG trains would take about three years to repair, and the gas-to-liquids repair would finish in the first quarter of 2027. The first North Field East expansion train was expected in the first half of 2027, with further trains depending on Hormuz and equipment access. Pipeline alternatives, he said, had been rejected on technical and commercial grounds. Read it at Reuters.
What this means for a reader
There are two gas stories, and they should not be blended. One is a permanent loss of about a sixth of Qatar's export capacity, which does not depend on any ceasefire. The other is a blockage of everything else, which depends entirely on whether the strait works. A peace deal would fix the second quickly and the first not at all.
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