Qatari LNG is trickling back through Hormuz, but the real divide now is who can afford to keep bidding for gas

Qatar is moving LNG again — but force majeure isn’t going anywhere yet. A Qatari cargo reached Pakistan last week after becoming the first known LNG shipment from the country to cross Hormuz since July, while several empty Qatar-linked tankers have also moved back toward the Gulf. These likely remain exceptions rather than a restart: traffic through the strait is still a fraction of pre-war levels, LNG tankers have turned back from attempted crossings, and QatarEnergy is still cancelling contracted deliveries months ahead.

Why it matters: Six months in, the question has shifted from whether Qatari LNG can move to who can still afford it when it doesn't. Qatar entered the crisis shipping some 77-80 mn tons of LNG a year — roughly a fifth of global supply — into a market with little spare liquefaction capacity and no meaningful bypass for Qatari cargoes around Hormuz. Europe relied on Qatar for around 10% of its LNG, while major Asian buyers including China, India, Japan, South Korea, Pakistan, and Bangladesh depended heavily on long-term Qatari contracts. When those flows stopped, both regions were pushed toward the same pool of flexible spot cargoes. Replacement LNG exists — but six months on, access increasingly comes down to who can keep bidding for it.

One cargo doesn’t undo six months of disruption

There are now two separate constraints keeping Qatari LNG bottled up. The first is Hormuz itself: Al Marrouna’s September crossing shows Doha can still negotiate or risk individual movements through the strait, and rare ship-to-ship transfers have allowed some cargoes to be handed off outside the Gulf — but neither workaround can carry anything close to Qatar's normal export program. The second constraint is physical, and harder to fix on any near-term timeline: Iranian strikes knocked two of Ras Laffan's 14 LNG trains offline, removing around 12.8 mtpa of capacity that could take three to five years to repair.

What's left of Ras Laffan is running hurt, not shut down. Undamaged trains have been kept operating at reduced rates, with loadings reaching a 10-day average of roughly 80k tons in August} — the strongest since March, but still around 60% below the previous year's pace. Qatar has also kept some production moving by supplying Kuwait and loading tankers already stranded inside the Gulf, buying operational continuity while the normal export map stays broken.

Not every buyer is losing this the same way

Losing Qatari gas hurts differently depending on how exposed and how flush a buyer is. Vulnerability comes down to three things: how much missing supply a buyer has to replace on the spot market, how easily it can switch away from gas, and whether it can afford replacement cargoes at much higher prices, Giovanni Bettinelli, gas market analyst, tells EnterpriseAM.

Pakistan and Bangladesh sit at the worst intersection of those three factors. Both combine heavy dependence on Qatari supply with limited ability to absorb higher spot prices. “But in India and Southeast Asia — they will see significant subsidy pressure but for these markets oil products are likely to be the greatest concern, not LNG,” Bettinelli adds.

Pakistan's rejected cargoes are the clearest evidence of that affordability ceiling. Before Al Marrouna arrived, Pakistan LNG had twice turned down a September spot cargo offered by BP Singapore — first at USD 26.9/mmBtu, then again at USD 26.7/mmBtu — because the price was too high.

Europe didn't dodge the shock — it outspent it

Europe's version of this crisis looks nothing like Pakistan's. Italy, Belgium, and Poland were Qatar's largest EU customers before the disruption, taking roughly 4.8 mt, 1.7 mt, and 1.6 mt respectively in 2025, Columbia University researcher Anne-Sophie Corbeau tells EnterpriseAM. Europe has largely kept the disruption from becoming a physical shortage by paying more for flexible LNG and drawing down an increasingly thin storage buffer.

That strategy has a running cost, and QatarEnergy is still adding to it: The company

has extended force majeure on Italy’s energy firm Edison LNG deliveries until early November, taking the total affected since April to 29 cargoes representing roughly 3.8 bcm. The company had replaced 21 of those cargoes by late August, equivalent to 2 bcm.

Other buyers are patching the gap their own way. Poland's Orlen has used its own LNG carrier fleet to lift replacement supply from US terminals, Brendan A'Hearn, gas market specialist at ICIS, tells EnterpriseAM. “But the biggest deficit is in Belgium, where QatarEnergy has had to sell many of its slots, some of which have not been bought and therefore remain empty,” he adds.

Replacing the cargoes still isn't the same as replacing the cushion. Consumption has stayed broadly stable year-on-year and most missing Qatari volumes were replaced, but Europe didn't buy enough extra LNG to keep storage injections on pace. Some of the supply gap has simply moved into lower inventories rather than showing up as shortages today, A'Hearn argues.

That's a wager Europe can only keep winning if the weather cooperates. Europe's edge into winter is its ability to keep outbidding more price-sensitive Asian buyers for flexible cargoes — but colder-than-expected weather or weaker renewable generation could accelerate storage withdrawals and set off another round of panic buying, Bettinelli notes.

The accidental beneficiary

If the Qatar shock has a clear near-term beneficiary, it's American gas. US supply has replaced the large majority of lost Qatari volumes into Europe, while Canada and smaller African producers have added incremental barrels. US LNG exports were already up 23% y-o-y in 1H 2026 as new liquefaction capacity came online.

Now the irony: Qatar may end up buying from the country that benefited most from its absence. QatarEnergy is seeking around 2-3 mtpa of US LNG under multi-year agreements through 2031 and has held talks with Venture Global, Cheniere, and Woodside after already buying dozens of US spot cargoes to cover customer commitments.

That gives Doha an exit that doesn't depend on Hormuz reopening. US cargoes can be lifted and delivered directly to QatarEnergy's customers from American terminals, letting the company keep meeting contracts without routing volumes through the Gulf at all — a longer runway that doesn't require the strait to normalize or Ras Laffan's damaged trains to come back online.