Qatari LNG is trickling back through Hormuz, but the question now is how can afford it

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. But it remains an exception: Hormuz traffic is 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 Hormuz bypass. 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 contracts. Replacement LNG exists — but six months on, access increasingly comes down to who can keep bidding for it.

Two constraints keep Qatari LNG bottled up: Doha can still negotiate individual Hormuz crossings and ship-to-ship transfers outside the Gulf, but neither carries anything close to Qatar's normal export program. The second constraint is physical: 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. Undamaged trains have been kept running at reduced rates — a 10-day average of roughly 80k tons in August, the strongest since March but still around 60% below the previous year’s pace.

Not every buyer is losing this the same way: Vulnerability comes down to three factors — 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, gas market analyst Giovanni Bettinelli tells EnterpriseAM. Pakistan and Bangladesh — both of whom combine heavy dependence on Qatari supply with limited ability to absorb higher spot prices — sit at the worst intersection. “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.

Europe didn’t dodge the shock — it outspent it: Italy, Belgium, and Poland were Qatar’s largest EU customers before the disruption, Columbia University researcher Anne-Sophie Corbeau tells EnterpriseAM. QatarEnergy 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, with 21 replaced by late August. Poland’s Orlen used its own LNG carrier fleet to lift replacement supply from US terminals, ICIS gas market specialist Brendan A'Hearn 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.”

A wager on the weather: Consumption held 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. 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 — and the irony: US supply has replaced the large majority of lost Qatari volumes into Europe. US LNG exports were already up 23% y-o-y in 1H 2026 as new liquefaction capacity came online. Meanwhile, QatarEnergy itself is seeking around 2-3 mtpa of US LNG under multi-year agreements through 2031, holding talks with Venture Global, Cheniere, and Woodside — an exit that doesn’t require Hormuz to reopen or Ras Laffan’s damaged trains to come back online.