12AUG

IEA logs Hormuz LNG loss at 2 bcm weekly

2 min read

14:52UTC

The IEA April Oil Market Report quantified the Hormuz disruption as removing over 300 Mmcm per day of LNG from Qatar and UAE since 1 March 2026, roughly 2 bcm per week and 12 bcm accumulated over six weeks, with mid-year resumption as the base case.

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Key takeaway

Over 2 bcm per week of Hormuz LNG supply is removed, IEA base case mid-year return.

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 weeks⁠¹. 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. Any slippage 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.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

The International Energy Agency (IEA) is a global organisation of energy-importing countries that publishes monthly analyses of oil and gas markets. Its April 2026 report calculated that the closure of the strait of Hormuz has been removing more than 2 billion cubic metres of gas per week from global markets since 1 March mostly gas from Qatar and the United Arab Emirates that would normally flow to Europe and Asia. Over six weeks that adds up to roughly 12 billion cubic metres about a third of what Europe typically injects into storage over an entire summer. The IEA expects Middle East gas flows to start returning around mid-year, but that estimate depends on a ceasefire holding and significant technical work at the affected export facilities.

Deep Analysis

Root Causes

The 2 bcm per week run-rate loss represents the structural consequence of concentrating 17% of global LNG export capacity in a single geographic complex at the end of a strait that has historically been subject to geopolitical risk. The Ras Laffan complex was built on the commercial logic that Hormuz is a stable transit corridor protected by CENTCOM deterrence. That deterrence failed to prevent the March 2026 strikes and the subsequent closure.

The force majeure declaration reveals a second structural risk: the legal architecture of Qatari LNG contracts does not provide European buyers with contractual remedies for a supply interruption attributable to a geopolitical event at the seller's end. Buyers in Belgium, Italy, and Poland face both a physical shortage and a contractual dead-end simultaneously.

What could happen next?

Consequence
The 2 bcm per week run-rate provides market participants with a weekly benchmarking tool: IEA's subsequent monthly reports will confirm whether the disruption is stable, deepening, or easing.
Risk
If the mid-year resumption assumption slips by four to six weeks, the overlap with Hammerfest's maintenance window extends, removing two flexible supply offsets from the injection season simultaneously.

Source Landscape

This story draws on neutral-leaning sources

Consensus view: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's energy security programme assesses the IEA mid-year resumption base case as optimistic: a Ras Laffan infrastructure assessment, followed by QatarEnergy commercial scheduling reconstruction and tanker repositioning, has historically taken three to five months after a force majeure event which places realistic mid-year resumption at Q3 earliest, not late Q2.

Counter-view: The Gulf Cooperation Council's Economic Affairs Secretariat argues that Qatar's long-term LNG buyers primarily in Japan, South Korea, and the EU have a strong mutual interest in expedited normalisation and will accept a phased restart at 60-70% of pre-conflict loading rates to begin recovering lost volume, reducing the actual supply gap more quickly than an all-or-nothing resumption model suggests.

Key tension: Whether the IEA's mid-year base case should be modelled as a binary full-resumption event or a probabilistic partial-resumption ramp that begins earlier but delivers fewer molecules per week over a longer period.

Sources:IEA

Mentions:International Energy Agency →QatarEnergy →Ras Laffan Industrial City →Carnegie Endowment for International Peace →Japan →South Korea →Qatar →TTF →Equinor →Hammerfest LNG →Strait of Hormuz →JKM →Strait of Hormuz Toll System →United Arab Emirates (UAE) →Oxford Institute for Energy Studies →

First Reported In

Update #3 · TTF holds six-week low as supply stack hardens

IEA· 17 Apr 2026

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Causes and effects

This Event

IEA logs Hormuz LNG loss at 2 bcm weekly

The primary multilateral estimate confirms the scale of the supply loss and anchors a mid-year return assumption that sits alongside the 90-day Qatari normalisation clock.

Led to

IRGC seizes Epaminondas and MSC Francesca

IEA April OMR quantified the Hormuz LNG loss at over 2 bcm per week, providing the baseline against which Iran's 18 April re-closure escalated supply risk.

Occurred 22 Apr 2026

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IEA pivots: Hormuz delay now multi-year, not mid-year

The IEA Q2 GMR multi-year delay revision directly supersedes the mid-year resumption base case published in the IEA April OMR tracked in ID:2526.

Occurred 25 Apr 2026

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Different Perspectives

Russia

Russia vetoed the same renewal on 17 September, arguing that Britain, France and Germany never validly triggered the snapback that reimposed the pre-2015 UN resolutions. No panel was ever seated under that mandate, so the UN list decays fastest for states that screen against it rather than against the American one.

China

China vetoed renewal of the UN sanctions monitoring mandate on 17 September, arguing that Resolution 2231 terminated on 18 October 2025 and that the Security Council should drop Iran's nuclear file altogether. On that reading there is nothing to monitor, so the sanctions survive and their enforcement does not.

Iraq

Baghdad saw the last American counter-Islamic State troops leave its territory on 30 September, completing a timetable it agreed with Washington in September 2024. Iraqi airspace deconfliction passes to Baghdad, which still has an open inquiry into the Maysan drone launches that has named nobody.

Pakistan

Treasury names Waseem Pasha Tajammal of Rawalpindi as the Cavalier group's chairman and places one of the designated incorporations in Islamabad. QatarEnergy separately told Pakistan that liquefied natural gas cargo cancellations would run through November, so Islamabad carries an enforcement question and a supply gap at once.

Turkey

Treasury named a Cavalier Dynamics company incorporated in Istanbul among the ten nodes it designated on 29 September, and Ankara has published no response. Turkey imported a record 120,000 barrels a day of Indian diesel in August, cutting Russia's share of its diesel imports to 20 per cent.

India

Suraj Yadav, a wiper from Uttar Pradesh, was killed aboard the Cape Dao on 23 September, and 19 of the ship's 20 Indian crew were taken off alive. India's September imports ran at 575,000 barrels a day from Iraq and 566,000 from Saudi Arabia, back to pre-conflict rates.