QatarEnergy CEO Saad al-Kaabi confirmed on 19 March that two of Qatar's 14 LNG trains and one gas-to-liquids facility have been destroyed in Iran's second wave of attacks on Ras Laffan Industrial City1. The damage removes 12.8 million tonnes per year of LNG export capacity — 17% of Qatar's total — for an estimated three to five years. Al-Kaabi put lost annual revenue at $20 billion; the destroyed units cost approximately $26 billion to build. QatarEnergy declared Force majeure on long-term supply contracts to Italy, Belgium, South Korea, and China2.
The three-to-five-year rebuild estimate is the figure that outlasts every other number in this war. LNG trains are cryogenic processing units engineered to cool natural gas to −162°C for shipment; they cannot be assembled from off-the-shelf components. Qatar's North Field Expansion programme, under construction before the war, took more than four years from contract award to first gas under peacetime conditions. A wartime rebuild — with insurance markets in retreat, the facility still within missile range, and no guarantee against further strikes — will run longer. The initial Ras Laffan attack three days earlier caused fires that civil defence teams extinguished. This second wave destroyed capacity outright.
Qatar is Europe's second-largest LNG supplier after the United States. EU gas storage had already fallen below 30% — a five-year low — as the critical refill season began. Bloomberg traders now expect the Asian LNG benchmark to surpass $26 per million British thermal units by mid-April3. Beyond LNG, condensate exports will drop 24%, LPG 13%, and helium 14%. Qatar is one of the world's largest helium producers, with output tied directly to its LNG processing; disruptions ripple into semiconductor fabrication and medical imaging, industries with no near-term substitute for the gas.
The Force majeure declarations distribute the damage across four continents. Italy accelerated its shift from Russian pipeline gas to Qatari LNG after 2022, hedging against geopolitical disruption — and has now lost part of that hedge to a different one. South Korea, among the world's three largest LNG importers, holds long-term Qatari contracts now subject to Force majeure. Qatar expelled Iranian military attachés within 24 hours of the first Ras Laffan strike, closing a diplomatic channel maintained since 1979. Tehran's response — destroying billions in Qatari infrastructure three days later — demonstrated that Iran will absorb the diplomatic cost of attacking a Gulf neighbour's economic foundations if it calculates the resulting energy-market disruption strengthens its hand against the US-Israeli campaign.
