The IEA (International Energy Agency)'s Q2-2026 Gas Market Report, published in Paris this week, states that the Middle East conflict is "expected to delay a significant amount of new LNG capacity that had been on track to come online in the second half of this decade" by at least two years1. Two weeks earlier, the same agency's April OMR (Oil Market Report) had run a mid-year resumption of Middle East deliveries as the base case. The Q2 report names demand-side balancing, particularly Asian fuel switching, as the primary market mechanism rather than supply restoration.
The IEA is the OECD's energy intelligence arm; its base case anchors most utility-side and trading-floor supply models in Europe. Reframing Hormuz damage from a maintenance window into a medium-term structural change is a material revision between consecutive publications, and it has not yet propagated. ENTSOG (European Network of Transmission System Operators for Gas)'s Summer Supply Outlook 2026 and ACER's 23 April monitoring report were both built on the OMR mid-year assumption and have not recalibrated.
The transmission channel for European hedge programmes runs through Cal 27 and Cal 28: a multi-year capacity delay at the Qatari liquefaction layer means the Atlantic basin absorbs the gap for longer than 2026 alone. That puts the forward TTF curve through next winter and the one after at risk of being under-priced if the Q2 framing holds. The IEA's two consecutive publications running different base cases inside two weeks suggests the agency's supply-side modelling team has moved faster than its market-balance team, and Asian buyer behaviour now becomes the swing variable on European pricing rather than the reopening date for the strait. Iranian tanker seizures and the absence of LNG transits through Hormuz this week sit behind the agency's revision.
