The International Energy Agency (IEA) published its April 2026 Oil Market Report quantifying the Hormuz disruption as removing over 300 Mmcm per day of LNG from Qatar and UAE since 1 March, more than 2 bcm per week and approximately 12 bcm accumulated over six weeks 1. The report sets the IEA base case as a mid-year resumption of Middle East deliveries, not a return to pre-conflict levels.
The IEA is the Paris-based intergovernmental body whose Monthly Oil Market Report is the primary multilateral quantification of global oil and gas balances. Placing the Hormuz LNG loss as a weekly run-rate rather than a cumulative figure lets market participants track whether the disruption is stable, deepening, or easing week by week. A stable run-rate at 2 bcm per week for six weeks is the signal the report is sending.
The figure sits against the EU storage starting position of 29.55% on 13 April . If more than 12 bcm of global supply has already been removed in six weeks, Europe's ability to outbid Asia for marginal cargoes deteriorates each week the disruption holds. The JKM-TTF spread geometry currently gives flexible Atlantic cargoes no routing-cost case for a European bias, which means the OIES-identified gap is not being closed by arbitrage; it would have to be closed by outbidding Asian spot demand outright.
The IEA mid-year base case deserves the pressure test. Counting from the closure date, the 90-day Qatari normalisation clock places the earliest plausible return well inside the European injection window, overlapping with Equinor's Hammerfest LNG planned restart. Any slippage on either side of that alignment extends the window during which European injection runs without the Qatari leg. The IEA's tracker in subsequent monthly reports will show whether the 2 bcm per week run-rate stabilises or deepens as the Q2 clock advances.
