The Afungi Shuttle, announced on July 22, links the Afungi peninsula in northern Mozambique with dedicated feeder connections from Nacala and Maputo, giving contractors a scheduled sea route into a site that has spent most of the past five years cut off from normal commercial traffic.

The service is built around two rotations, Nacala to Afungi and back, and Maputo to Afungi and back. MSC says it will carry construction materials, machinery, industrial equipment, spare parts and other cargo needed for the development of the liquefied natural gas project at Afungi.

Customers get access through connections from trade lanes serving Europe, the Mediterranean, the Americas, Asia, the Middle East and Southern Africa, with a single booking and one commercial point of contact rather than a chain of separate arrangements.

That last detail matters more than it sounds. By folding the coastal feeder leg into the main booking, MSC is removing a handover point that has historically been where project cargo goes wrong, and where costs quietly multiply.

Why Afungi needs its own shipping line
Afungi sits on a peninsula in Cabo Delgado, Mozambique’s northernmost coastal province, a long way from the country’s established logistics corridors. Road links are thin, the nearest sizeable port at Pemba has limited capacity for heavy project cargo, and the region carries a security history that has kept commercial operators cautious.

The project the shuttle is designed to serve is among the largest energy investments ever attempted in Africa. TotalEnergies and its partners declared force majeure in 2021 after an insurgent assault on the nearby town of Palma, and the half built site sat idle for four years.

The consortium voted to lift force majeure on November 7 2025, clearing the way for full mobilisation at the onshore Afungi site and the offshore installation areas.

A full restart was announced jointly at Afungi on January 29 2026 by TotalEnergies chief executive Patrick Pouyanne and Mozambican president Daniel Chapo.

Construction has since resumed onshore and offshore, with more than 4,000 workers mobilised, of whom over 3,000 are Mozambican nationals, and the project standing at roughly 40% complete after most engineering and equipment procurement was finished during the pause.

First gas is expected in 2029 from a development designed to produce more than 13 million tonnes of LNG a year, with the government projecting as much as USD 35 billion in lifetime revenue from taxes, profit oil and other contributions.

A project of that scale consumes an extraordinary volume of imported material. Steel, modular units, cranes, generators, camp infrastructure, pipe, valves and a constant flow of replacement parts all have to arrive by sea.

Without a reliable liner service, contractors are left chartering vessels individually, which is expensive, slow to arrange and difficult to plan against a construction schedule.

Nacala as the northern anchor
The choice of Nacala as one of the two feeder ports is telling. The port currently has capacity of 10 million tonnes a year and handled 3.5 million tonnes in 2024, running at about 35% of what it can take. Its container terminal is rated at 252,000 boxes a year, and its navigable channel runs deeper than 18 metres, removing the need for constant dredging.

In other words, Nacala has spare room and deep water, two things that are rare on this coastline. Maputo has also moved to concession an integrated expansion and development project at Nacala through an international tender, aimed at maximising capacity along the wider Nacala corridor.

That corridor, operational since 2016 after a USD 4.5 billion investment involving Vale, Mitsui and state operator CFM, connects the deep water port to a 912 kilometre railway.

Maputo, at the opposite end of the country, provides a second feeder point closer to South African industrial suppliers and to the established southern African logistics base. Between them, the two rotations give shippers a northern and a southern entry into the same destination.

A commercial bet with visible risks
For MSC, the shuttle is a low cost way to attach itself to a decade of project demand. The carrier operates a network of 675 offices, planning around 300 routes to 520 ports across more than 155 countries, and a short feeder loop is a modest addition to that footprint. If the LNG build runs to schedule, the return is a steady, predictable flow of high value project cargo through 2029 and beyond.

The risks are equally visible. The service is heavily exposed to a single customer base, and if the construction programme slows, so does the cargo.

Security in Cabo Delgado remains contingent on the continued presence of Rwandan and regional forces, and analysts have warned that a fortified project enclave does little for the communities outside its perimeter. There are also unresolved questions about resettlement and environmental impact in a sensitive coastal zone.

What to watch
The immediate test is utilisation. Feeder services into single project destinations either fill quickly or struggle, and the first few months of sailings will show which way this one goes. The second test is whether other carriers follow.

If MSC proves the route commercially, competitors will look at Pemba and Nacala with fresh interest, and northern Mozambique starts to acquire something it has never had, which is routine liner connectivity rather than one off charters.

The longer term prize is that a shipping lane built for gas construction does not have to stay that way. Ports serve whoever turns up.

Should the Afungi Shuttle survive past the construction phase, Cabo Delgado would gain a permanent maritime link, and a province better known for conflict would have a piece of infrastructure pointing in a different direction.

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What began as a military operation against Iran’s nuclear and command infrastructure escalated within 48 hours into something the International Energy Agency (IEA) would later call the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market, eclipsing even the 1973 Arab oil embargo.

Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz – the 33-kilometre chokepoint through which roughly a fifth of the world’s seaborne oil and LNG normally passes – did what geopolitics rarely manages: it forced nearly every government on earth to rethink, in the space of a few months, how it powers itself.

Six months on, with ceasefires struck, broken and re-struck, the headline numbers have become almost familiar. Brent crude, trading in the low seventies before the war, spiked past USD 120 a barrel within days.

Qatar’s Ras Laffan LNG complex took a direct hit that analysts estimated would need three to five years to repair, sending Asian spot LNG prices up by more than 140% overnight. Petrol pumps from Hanoi to Berlin saw queues not witnessed in a generation.

But the more consequential story is not the spike – spikes fade – it is what governments, companies and households did in response, and how much of that response looks permanent.

A crisis measured in decades, not weeks
Energy analysts have a habit of drawing three-scenario charts for crises like this: quick resolution, prolonged standoff, and full-blown regional war.

What has actually unfolded is messier – a stop-start conflict with ceasefires that hold for weeks before collapsing, as happened again in July when strikes resumed on tankers in the strait.

That unpredictability is itself the lasting economic signal. Markets can price in a war. What they cannot easily price in is a war that keeps almost-ending.

This is precisely why the IEA’s 2026 World Energy Investment report, released in May, reads less like a snapshot of a single bad year and more like a hinge point. Global energy investment is on course to hit USD 3.4 trillion in 2026, and the composition of that spending tells the real story.

Oil investment is set to fall for a third consecutive year, dropping below USD 500 billion, even as crude prices sit well above their pre-war range. That is a striking reversal of how energy shocks used to work. The 1970s oil crises triggered a drilling boom.

This one has done the opposite, because producers no longer believe elevated prices will last long enough to justify decade-long upstream commitments, and because the risk premium attached to Gulf infrastructure has made the region itself a harder place to invest in.

Where the money is going instead is instructive. Natural gas investment is climbing to USD 330 billion, its highest level in a decade, driven overwhelmingly by new liquefied natural gas export terminals in the United States and Qatar – a hedge against exactly the kind of chokepoint vulnerability Hormuz just exposed.

Renewables remain the largest single category of spending, at roughly USD 665 billion, more than half of it in solar. And in a twist that unsettles the clean-energy narrative, coal investment is heading for USD 180 billion, its highest since 2012, as Asian economies squeezed by the oil and gas disruption fall back on the one fuel many of them can produce at home. China alone accounts for close to 70% of that coal spending, even as it simultaneously leads the world in solar deployment.

The lesson governments appear to be drawing from this crisis is not “decarbonise faster” or “drill more,” it is “diversify everything,” reaching for whatever domestic resource is available, renewable or otherwise.

The geography of who pays
Energy shocks have never been distributed evenly, and this one is unusually blunt about who absorbs the pain.

The Gulf states that built their economic models on frictionless Hormuz transit – Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar – have seen exports collapse even with alternative pipelines like the East-West Petroline and the Abu Dhabi Crude Oil Pipeline running near capacity, together offering barely a tenth of what used to move through the strait.

Meanwhile, exporters outside the conflict zone have quietly profited. Analysis comparing shipping data before and after the war found the United States gained roughly USD 50 billion in additional export revenue and Russia more than USD 15 billion, simply by being able to ship oil that Gulf producers could not.

The knock-on effects reach further than fuel bills. Roughly ten million Indians work in the Gulf and send home upwards of USD 40 billion a year – around a third of India’s total remittance inflows – so any prolonged slowdown in Gulf economies lands directly on household incomes thousands of kilometres away.

Fertiliser markets, dependent on natural gas as a feedstock, tightened alongside LNG, prompting warnings from food-policy researchers about a slower-burning threat to crop yields in fertiliser-import-dependent regions well into 2027 and beyond.

And in a detail that says something about how thinly some economies are stretched, small trading states from Djibouti to Vietnam reported the kind of acute fuel shortages and panic buying that oil-rich nations barely noticed.

The unlikely beneficiaries
Every energy shock creates its opportunists, and this one has already reshaped investment maps well beyond the Middle East. Rystad Energy and other consultancies now point to Brazil, Guyana and Suriname as likely beneficiaries of a slower but broader fossil-fuel diversification through the 2030s, as buyers who once defaulted to Gulf crude look for suppliers with less geopolitical baggage.

Brazilian meat and poultry exporters, cut off from their usual direct routes to Gulf buyers, have rerouted through the Red Sea and Suez Canal at higher cost – a small but telling example of how conflict in one region reshapes trade logistics in entirely unrelated industries.

Electric vehicles have had an unexpectedly good war. April 2026 was the strongest month for EV sales in Europe on record, as fuel price volatility pushed consumers toward vehicles insulated from the pump. The United Kingdom saw its highest rate of solar panel installations since 2012 over the same period.

None of this is coincidence: crises that make fossil fuel prices unpredictable tend to make the fixed, known cost of a solar panel or a battery look considerably more attractive, regardless of what a country’s climate policy says on paper.

What actually sticks
The hardest question for anyone trying to write about this conflict’s “long-term effects” while it is still not entirely over is which changes are structural and which are simply crisis reflexes that will unwind the moment the strait reopens for good. Strategic petroleum releases, excise duty cuts, emergency tax credits for fuel-poor households – these belong to the second category. They will fade.

What looks more durable is the shift in how governments think about energy security itself. The IEA’s language is telling: officials now speak of “resilience rather than optimisation” as the organising principle of energy policy. That is a genuine change in worldview, not just a spending line.

Countries that spent the 2010s optimising for the cheapest barrel are now willing to pay a premium for supply they control, whether that means Chinese coal plants staying open longer than planned, new US and Qatari LNG terminals, or European grid investment running 20% higher than a year ago.

The IEA itself notes that nearly three-quarters of 2026’s investment decisions were locked in before the war began, meaning the fuller reckoning – in financing costs, in project pipelines, in where the next generation of energy infrastructure gets built – is still working its way through the system.

If the 1973 oil shock taught the world that energy security and foreign policy were inseparable, and the 2022 Ukraine invasion taught Europe that pipeline dependency was a strategic liability, the 2026 Iran war may end up teaching a subtler lesson: that in an interconnected energy system, the search for security itself becomes destabilising when every country chases it at once.

Six months in, the world is not so much replacing oil as hedging against needing quite so much of it from quite so few places – a shift that will likely outlast the war that triggered it by many year

The post How the Iran war rewired the world’s energy habits in just five months appeared first on International Finance.

TotalEnergies also sees its production growing significantly in the third quarter, although exports will still be dependent on freedom of passage through the Strait of Hormuz.

“Hormuz is a battleground, and the risks of crossing are extremely high … We are beginning to consider this could become the new normal, with the strait opening on and off,” CEO Patrick Pouyanne told analysts on a results call.

TotalEnergies’ adjusted net income was USD 6 billion, in line with expectations, according to a consensus of analysts polled by LSEG.

However, weaker LNG earnings proved to be a big drag on the earnings. ⁠Still, the latest figures stood way above USD 3.6 billion, seen in the second quarter of 2025, and USD 5.4 billion, registered in the first quarter of 2026.

The company has also maintained its USD 1.5 billion share buyback scheme for the third quarter, with its stock rising 37% so far this year.

The Iran-Iraq war has disrupted traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, still cutting supplies, which is in turn causing massive price volatilities in the crude and gas segments. While the phenomenon has left a damaging imprint on the global economy, oil majors such as Norway’s Equinor have registered massive profit windfalls in this environment.

TotalEnergies’ exploration and production earnings reached USD 3.2 billion, a 64% rise from the same period a year ago and 25% higher than the first quarter of 2026, with Middle East operations slowly stabilising.

As per Pouyanne, both upstream and downstream segments benefitted from the war, which is unusual, as a higher upstream oil price means smaller margins on refining fuels. TotalEnergies’ refineries, mostly in Europe, have maximised diesel and jet ‌fuel production, ⁠which are earning the best premiums given low inventories across the continent.

“Income from refining and chemicals, which includes TotalEnergies’ oil trading division, rose 362% to USD 1.8 billion, helped by stronger fuel margins and robust oil trading — eclipsing last quarter’s standout USD 1.5 billion contribution,” Pouyanne noted, while stating that the French energy giant’s SATORP refinery in Saudi Arabia should return to full capacity by the end of the Q3 2026 after sustaining damage from Iran war-related attacks.

Talking about the LNG division, it earned USD 807 million, a 22% drop, due to trading ⁠underperformance amid flat demand in Europe. The electricity division was down 7% at USD 533 million, but cash flow excluding working capital was up 28% due to TotalEnergies nearly doubling its portfolio of gas-fired power plants in the continent after closing a deal with EPH in April.

TotalEnergies will soon finalise its exit ⁠from its 10% stake in the sanctioned Arctic LNG 2 plant in Russia. The transfer of the venture’s 10% stake to Nordline, a subsidiary of the plant’s majority owner Novatek, has been approved by Russian authorities and will be completed ⁠in the short term.

Following Western sanctions on Russia in the wake of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, Total maintained ownership in key Russian plants exporting LNG but had been considering selling the stakes as the European Union (EU) kerbs are targeting companies from importing that gas or selling it in other jurisdictions.

“Soon after Arctic LNG 2 became subject to US sanctions in November 2023, ‌Novatek ⁠approached us about a potential transfer,” Pouyanne said.

In 2022, the year which saw both the beginning of the Ukraine war and the West’s targeted economic response against Russia, Total took a USD 4.1 billion impairment on the project. In 2023, it declared force majeure. Total, however, is still earning about USD 400 million annually from selling cargoes from Russia’s Yamal LNG plant.

In Namibia, Total is expecting a final investment decision (FID) on the 150,000-barrels-per-day Venus development in the coming weeks. In Suriname, production on the Gran Morgu development will begin in 2028. In Cyprus, the Cronos gas field development will receive FID by the end of July 2026.

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That assumption has been tested more severely in 2026 than at any point in recent memory, and the Gulf’s response is now visible in trucks, pipelines and ports rather than just in policy papers.

In the second week of July, Dubai-based DP World added 700 lorries to its regional fleet, a move that will support up to 35,000 additional trips a month across the GCC.

The company said the fleet would serve first, middle and last-mile logistics, covering both containerised and non-containerised cargo, and that it forms part of a wider effort to build bonded, customs-controlled road corridors linking east coast gateways directly to Jebel Ali Port.

DP World’s logistics chief for the GCC, Raveen Guliani, framed it as a response to what customers now demand. He claims they need certainty and reliability in a region where the sea route can no longer be taken for granted.

That single announcement is a small piece of a much larger shift. Since fighting between the United States and Iran erupted in February and repeatedly flared since, Gulf states and the companies operating within them have moved from treating Hormuz contingency planning as an occasional exercise to treating it as core infrastructure strategy.

The question now being asked in boardrooms from Riyadh to Abu Dhabi is not whether to reduce dependence on the strait, but how far that dependence can realistically be cut, and how quickly.

A war that keeps reopening the wound
The scale of the disruption explains the urgency. Iran’s closure of Hormuz to non-Iranian vessels forced Gulf producers to shut in as much as 12 million barrels per day of oil at the peak of the crisis. Iraqi output collapsed from around 4.3 million barrels a day to under 1.5 million in May.

Kuwait declared force majeure. Bahrain’s Sitra refinery was struck repeatedly. A ceasefire framework reached in June briefly restored some shipping, but it has proved fragile.

Strikes and counter-strikes resumed in July, tankers were hit inside the strait, and daily transits have fallen from around 135 ships before the war to fewer than 40 in recent weeks, according to shipping data cited in regional reporting.

Washington has since said it will reimpose a naval blockade of Iranian ports and floated the idea of tolls (20% transit fee) for “safe passage” of ships through the strait, a proposal Tehran has publicly haggled over rather than rejected outright.

As per the latest updates, the Donald Trump administration has dropped the idea, pursuing instead trade and investment agreements with Gulf states.

Every time the waterway closes or comes under threat, the economic cost lands immediately on Gulf exporters and on global energy and shipping prices. That repeated shock, rather than any single event, is what has pushed the region towards what might be called a “Hormuz Plus One” strategy.

The idea is to keep using the strait when it is open, but build enough parallel capacity on land and along the Red Sea and Gulf of Oman coasts that a closure no longer means an economic stop.

Saudi Arabia’s pipeline bet
Saudi Arabia’s answer predates the current war by more than four decades. The East-West Pipeline, also known as Petroline, was built in the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq war specifically to move crude from the Kingdom’s eastern fields to the Red Sea port of Yanbu without touching Hormuz.

It has proved its worth this year with Aramco pushing the line to its full capacity of seven million barrels a day within days of the first strikes, and Yanbu exports reaching around five million barrels a day since.

That capacity, however, only partly offsets what Hormuz can carry. Roughly 15 million barrels a day of crude used to move through the strait before the war, meaning even a maxed-out Petroline covers well under half of that flow.

This is why Riyadh is reportedly in preliminary talks to expand the pipeline’s capacity by a further one to two million barrels a day, according to sources cited by Reuters, potentially with a smaller secondary line dedicated to refined products.

The project would take years and cost billions, and would require changes to how Saudi crude is priced for international buyers.

Crucially, the Kingdom is also discussing whether the expanded system could carry crude on behalf of neighbours who have no pipeline options of their own, Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar among them. Kuwait’s state oil company has confirmed talks are under way with both Saudi Arabia and the UAE to find space for its barrels.

The UAE goes further, and faster
If Saudi Arabia’s approach is decades-old infrastructure being stretched, the UAE’s is a newer and broader build-out. Abu Dhabi’s existing Habshan-Fujairah pipeline already carries up to 1.8 million barrels a day of crude to the Gulf of Oman coast, bypassing Hormuz entirely. ADNOC is fast-tracking a second pipeline along the same route, reportedly around half complete, aimed at doubling that capacity by 2027.

What is more striking is that the UAE strategy has moved well beyond oil. With container traffic at Jebel Ali, Dubai’s flagship port and one of the world’s largest, having fallen by as much as 95% at the height of the Strait’s closure, DP World is now in talks to build an entirely new multipurpose port and container terminal at Fujairah, on the Gulf of Oman coast, according to reporting by the Financial Times. Cargo landed there would move onward to Dubai, Abu Dhabi and other commercial centres by road, dovetailing directly with the kind of trucking capacity DP World has just expanded.

Parallel expansion is under way at Khor Fakkan, where Sharjah-based Gulftainer has committed roughly two billion dollars to grow capacity, and at Dibba, with UAE officials scoping out at least one further harbour along the same coastline.

The government’s own language leaves little ambiguity about intent. UAE Minister of Foreign Trade Thani Al Zeyoudi has said the country is aiming for “Zero Hormuz Dependency,” regardless of whether the Strait remains open. New rail links, roads and pipelines are being built to connect these eastern ports and fields to the country’s population and industrial centres, an implicit acknowledgement that ports alone cannot absorb the shift without inland logistics to match.

Where the strategy runs into limits
Even so, “Hormuz Plus One” is not the same as “Hormuz Optional.” Analysts note that the conflict has focused regional minds on the risks of relying on a single chokepoint, but the physics of oil and gas infrastructure impose hard limits on how far that reliance can fall. Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar have no pipelines of their own and depend entirely on Saudi or Emirati goodwill and spare capacity.

Iraq’s northern pipeline to Turkey remains dogged by disputes and runs well below its potential.

Qatar’s economy rests overwhelmingly on liquefied natural gas (LNG), which cannot simply be piped overland in the way crude can; Doha is examining several alternatives, including routing through Saudi territory, but none offers anything close to a full substitute for seaborne LNG carriers transiting Hormuz.

Containerised trade faces its own version of this problem. Trucking and rail can absorb meaningful volumes, DP World’s overland corridors have already moved more than 350,000 twenty-foot equivalent units since the disruption began, but that is a fraction of the more than 15 million containers Jebel Ali alone handles in a normal year.

Road networks, customs posts and warehousing in Fujairah, Khor Fakkan and Dibba are already under visible strain from the diversion so far, with weekly container movements through Khor Fakkan rising roughly eightfold and daily truck traffic climbing from around 100 vehicles to close to 8,500.

A structural shift, not a full escape
What is emerging, then, is not an exit from Hormuz but a hedge against it. Saudi Arabia’s pipeline expansion and the UAE’s port and pipeline build-out will, over the next two to three years, meaningfully raise the volume of oil that can move without touching the strait, and DP World’s road and rail investments will do the same for containerised goods.

Together, these efforts could shave a serious portion off the economic damage of any future closure, particularly for crude oil, where physical bypass infrastructure already exists and is being expanded.

But total independence from Hormuz remains out of reach for the foreseeable future, especially for gas, for smaller Gulf states without their own pipelines, and for the sheer volume of containerised trade that still needs a deep-water port inside the strait to function efficiently.

The Gulf is not abandoning Hormuz. It is building a costly, overlapping insurance policy around it, one truck, pipeline and port terminal at a time, in the hope that the next time tensions flare near Bandar Abbas, the region’s economies will not have to hold their breath quite so completely.

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Mwani Qatar, the integrated logistics services provider responsible for managing the Gulf nation’s seaports and shipping terminals, stated, “Qatar ports welcomed 121 vessels in June 2026, marking a 21% growth compared to last May. Additionally, the ports handled over 78,000 TEUs, up 13%, nearly 23,000 tons of general cargo, and over 67,000 tons of bulk cargo, a 40% increase from the previous month.”

“The three ports handled 78,002 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU) containers, 23,092 tonnes of general cargo, 67,371 tonnes of bulk cargo, and 7,264 heads of livestock. Positioned strategically and supported by a rapidly expanding shipping network, the ports enable seamless and secure cargo flow and transshipment operations,” it added further.

The latest figures augur well for Qatar’s economy, which took a solid hit from the recently concluded Iran war, with the facilities producing LNG, the Gulf major’s key economic driver, receiving severe hits from Iranian missiles and drones. By boosting customer experience, Mwani Qatar is consolidating its role as the main growth engine of the nation’s integrated logistics sector.

“Advanced technology and modern operational capabilities have enabled Mwani Qatar to further strengthen marine safety and streamline port operations, with the organization delivering a comprehensive range of services designed to ensure the safe and efficient movement of vessels throughout Qatar’s maritime network,” the organization remarked.

Until the lead-up to the Iran war, Mwani Qatar had solidified its position as a fundamental pillar of economic diversification in Qatar and a vital link in the global supply chain. The year 2025 was characterized by the organization as the one where it showed steadfast commitment to operational efficiency, digital innovation, and sustainable growth, in alignment with the goals of the “Qatar National Vision 2030.”

“By achieving record handling rates and increasing Hamad Port’s share of regional trade, Mwani continues to fulfill the Ministry of Transport’s strategic plan to transform Qatar into a vital commercial and logistical hub in the region. By providing world-class competitive services, it supports the non-oil sector and contributes to turning the country’s national vision into a tangible reality,” the authority reiterated.

Recently, in a strong validation of Mwani’s industry-defining leadership, Hamad Port, Qatar’s main gateway to world trade, climbed three spots to rank eighth globally and second in the Gulf region in the 2025 Container Port Performance Index (CPPI), developed by the World Bank and S&P Global Market Intelligence.

This achievement reflects the port’s high operational efficiency and its capacity to maintain superior performance and resilience despite geopolitical disruptions and shifts in global trade and supply chains. The upbeat ranking also validates Qatar’s position as the Gulf region’s principal maritime gateway, with the country’s ports quickly emerging as upcoming integrated trade and logistical hubs.

“The CPPI is widely regarded as one of the most comprehensive assessments of container port performance worldwide. Developed using extensive operational data, the index evaluates ports primarily on vessel turnaround times, the time required for ships to complete loading and unloading operations. The metric serves as a key indicator of efficiency, reliability, and the overall quality of port services. Hamad Port’s improved standing demonstrates its capacity to sustain superior operational performance in an increasingly challenging global environment. The ranking also underscores the port’s emergence as a major regional logistics hub,” Mwani said.

While Qatar’s key trade hubs and integrated logistics ecosystem remain resilient against the fallouts of the Iran war, the country is looking to resume its usual levels of LNG production “within a few weeks,” said Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani while interacting with the Financial Times (FT).

For the government, restoring output has emerged as a top priority following months of disruption caused by the volatile geopolitics. The blast at QatarEnergy’s Barzan gas processing facility, which happened due to a technical malfunction and ended up killing 13 people and injuring 66, has raised fresh questions over both the pace of the country’s energy sector recovery and safety.

Iranian missile and drone attacks knocked out 17% of Qatar’s LNG export capacity in March. Two of the country’s 14 LNG trains and one of its two gas-to-liquids facilities were severely damaged. QatarEnergy had already suspended LNG production at Ras Laffan on 28th February after the outbreak of hostilities between the US, Israel, and Iran, following a drone attack on the industrial complex.

The disruption tightened helium markets after LNG production was halted at Ras Laffan, a key source of crude helium supply. The Gulf major accounts for around 30% of the world’s helium production capacity, with more than 80% of its output recovered as a by-product of LNG processing at the Helium 1 and Helium 2 facilities in Ras Laffan Industrial City.

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the strategic waterway that accounts for around 20% of global LNG trade and serves as the export route for almost all of Qatar’s LNG shipments, hurt the country’s economy further.

While LNG tankers have begun transiting the strait again following an interim US-Iran peace agreement, reached on 15th June, shipping activity has remained below pre-conflict levels.

The post Qatar’s logistics activities remain strong as Gulf major eyes comeback at LNG front appeared first on International Finance.

LNG is simply natural gas that has been cooled to a liquid state so it can be loaded onto special ships and transported across oceans. For India, the world’s third-largest energy consumer and heavily reliant on imports, securing long-term LNG supply from Argentina matters strategically. It diversifies the Latin American country’s energy sourcing away from the volatile Middle East, where much of its current supply originates.

The contract was awarded by Southern Energy SA, jointly owned by Norwegian energy firm Golar LNG and Argentine oil producer Pan American Energy. APSEZ won the deal through a global competitive bidding process, partnering with Argentine firm Meridian Group. The two have formed a joint venture called Meridian Transportes Maritimos SA to carry out the work, backed by an estimated investment of USD 70 million.

In its first phase, the project is expected to produce 2.45 MT of LNG annually, equivalent to approximately 28 cargoes per year, making it Argentina’s first operational LNG export project.

Mr. Ashwani Gupta, whole-time director and chief executive officer (CEO), APSEZ, said, “This project reflects our growing capability to support large-scale energy infrastructure projects across geographies. With marine operations in 12 countries and a growing fleet of marine assets supporting ports, LNG terminals, national oil companies, refineries, and offshore facilities, we bring deep operational expertise to complex maritime environments. By combining these capabilities with strong local partnerships, we are helping create reliable maritime ecosystems that enable new energy trade corridors and strengthen long-term supply resilience.”

The team will handle all ship-related support needed to get LNG safely loaded and dispatched, including operating tugboats that guide massive tankers into and out of port, providing offshore supply support, and ferrying crew to and from the floating facility. Four specialized tugboats, one supply and anchor-handling vessel, and one crew boat will be deployed for the purpose.

The gas will be liquefied aboard a floating platform called the Hilli Episeyo, anchored in the San Matias Gulf off Argentina’s Patagonian coast. Commercial operations are expected to begin in September 2027, with the project initially producing around 2.45 million tonnes of LNG per year, equivalent to roughly 28 shipments annually.

The timing reflects Argentina’s broader economic ambitions. The Latin American country has been aggressively monetizing its vast Vaca Muerta shale gas reserves under market-oriented reforms, and this project is the first concrete result of that push reaching international markets.

Argentina already has agreements in place to export up to 10 million tonnes of LNG annually to India from 2027, making the Southern Energy project the opening chapter of a supply corridor that could reshape how the South Asian giant powers itself in the decades ahead.

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The world’s fifth-largest ‌oil importer, which imports roughly USD 70 billion to USD 90 billion worth of crude oil annually, sourcing over 90% of its supplies from the Middle East, got just 850,000 barrels per day (4.07 million kilolitres) of crude in April, METI data showed, against the established capacity of over 2.3 million barrels per day.

While imports from the Middle East fell 68%, shipments from Japan’s two largest suppliers – Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – dropped 60% or more, as the Hormuz stalemate has disrupted the supplies of roughly a fifth of the world’s oil and LNG that happen through the strategically crucial transit route. Despite several crude oil tankers leaving the Gulf region in May, energy flows via the key waterway have remained far lower than pre-war levels.

These have resulted in refiners in Japan and Asia deepening production run cuts since April due to the oil supply shortage.

Japan’s domestic oil product sales, in April, ⁠fell 11.3% from a year earlier to 2.04 million bpd, the METI data showed. Gasoline sales too went downhill, dropping 2.6% to 693,875 bpd. Kerosene sales were down 13.3% to 120,524 bpd. Sales of petrochemical feedstock naphtha reduced 35.6% to 406,231 bpd. Crude oil imports from the United States, however, rose by 38.8%.

Apart from the fall in the oil supply, a weak yen has also resulted in the import price hitting a record high. As per the METI estimates, the customs-cleared import price for crude oil stood at JPY101,389 (USD 637.8) per kilolitre in April, the highest since comparable records began in 1979. The previous record was JPY99,600 in July 2022, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“In dollar terms, the customs-cleared import price was USD 101.2 per barrel, the 57th highest on record,” the data said further.

Japan’s crude import price, also known as the Japan Crude Cocktail (JCC), is based on customs-cleared CIF (cost, insurance and freight) prices and is sensitive to global crude price movements, with a lag of about one month due to shipping times.

Higher JCC prices often raise the crude oil (along with LNG) import cost, which in turn makes thermal power generation an expensive affair, leading directly to soaring electricity bills.

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The declining investment appetite comes at a time when the global energy markets remain disrupted by the Iran war, which has halted tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, apart from causing production stoppages across the Middle East.

These developments have forced companies to accelerate ⁠investment in other geographies and boost spending on renewables, LNG and coal to shore up supply security.

“We are already seeing intensified efforts by both producer and consumer countries to diversify trade routes and energy sources,” IEA Director Fatih Birol said.

The “World Energy Investment 2026” report predicts capital flows to the energy sector to grow 5% in 2026 to reach USD 3.4 trillion, despite Middle East disruptions.

“Expectations for investment across different fuels vary widely, with oil set for another subdued year. Natural gas and coal are poised for continued growth as the next major wave of LNG projects advances and energy security concerns in Asia drive renewed demand for coal,” the report said.

While USD 2.2 trillion will go to renewables, energy ‌storage, ⁠power grids and low-emission fuels, less than USD 500 billion will be invested in oil supply. Total spending on fossil fuel supply in 2026 is expected to reach just over USD 1 trillion, returning to 2024 levels after the near 3% decline in 2025.

“Heightened concerns over energy security are expected to boost investment in domestic power supply, including renewables, nuclear and coal. This comes at a time when global investment in renewable electricity is flattening after several years of rapid growth, although renewables still account for more than 70% of total power generation spending, including USD 365 billion – USD 1 billion a day – for solar projects. At the same time, orders for new natural gas-fired power plants surged to 130 GW in 2025, a 25-year high, with US data centre demand a major driver,” the report added.

Natural gas’ investment growth will largely come from the United States-based projects. However, the current energy shock that arose from the Strait of Hormuz blockade has made Asian importers cautious on gas dependence.

“Coal investments will reach a 14-year high, hitting USD 180 billion, ⁠driven by China and India. “Nuclear is making a comeback with USD 80 billion in spending this year,” IEA remarked.

The gloom will be upon the Middle East, as oil and gas investments are expected to fall 1% ⁠in 2026. Damage from the Iranian missile and drone attacks; lower revenue; and production stoppages, in the IEA’s opinion, are reducing the region’s ability to deploy capital.

By contrast, upstream investment in Africa, Central and South America will ⁠jump more than 10% in 2026 as ongoing projects gain momentum.

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In 2025 and 2026, this route has generated enormous excitement. Record numbers of ships are making the crossing. Chinese container vessels are completing the journey in under three weeks. India is signing mineral deals with Russia that could send a new category of cargo through the frozen north. On paper, the Arctic is open for business.

But the full picture is considerably more complicated, and considerably less flattering. While one set of numbers is climbing, another is falling. The route is simultaneously booming and contracting, expanding in one narrow slice while collapsing in the far larger slice that actually matters. Understanding why requires separating two very different things that often get confused in the headlines.

Two Routes in One

When analysts talk about the Northern Sea Route, they are actually describing two distinct corridors that happen to share the same geography.

The first is a domestic Russian export pipeline. Giant tankers loaded with liquefied natural gas and crude oil depart from Russian Arctic ports and sail to customers in Asia. This traffic makes up roughly 82% of everything that moves on the route. It is not international trade in the conventional sense. It is Russia shipping its own natural resources to paying customers.

The second is genuine international transit, where a ship travels the full length of the route from one end to the other without stopping at Russian ports. Think of a Chinese container ship loading goods in Shanghai and sailing them all the way through Arctic waters to a port in Germany. This is the category that is genuinely booming, and it is also the far smaller of the two.

In 2025, the total cargo moved along the Northern Sea Route fell for the second year in a row, dropping to 37.02 million metric tonnes, roughly 870,000 tonnes less than in 2024. This reverses years of growth and sits quite far from the Russian government’s official targets of 80 million tonnes by 2024, and 200 million tonnes by 2030.

At the same time, the number of international transit voyages reached a record 103 in 2025, up from 97 the year before. Those voyages moved approximately 3.2 million tonnes of cargo. So, the transit boom is real, but it is also responsible for less than 9% of the route’s total traffic.

Peter Sand, Chief Analyst at freight intelligence platform Xeneta, put the scale of the transit trade in stark perspective. “The number of ships transiting the Northern Sea Route last year was a record high. But we counted 15 ships, so that’s what a record high looks like,” he said. On the economics, Sand was equally direct: “Shorter distance is clearly attractive. But you still have to factor in expensive transit costs.”

Why Container Ships Are Coming

The surge in container transits is not happening because the Arctic route has suddenly become easy or cheap. It is happening because the alternative routes have become painful.

Since late 2023, militant groups in Yemen have been attacking cargo ships in the Red Sea near the Bab al-Mandab strait, one of the world’s busiest waterways. In response, most major shipping lines diverted their vessels around the southern tip of Africa via the Cape of Good Hope. By mid-2024, traffic through the Suez Canal had fallen by roughly 70%, costing Egypt an estimated $800 million a month in lost revenue.

For a Chinese exporter, rerouting around Africa adds enormous distance, time, and fuel cost to every shipment. In that context, the Arctic option began to look less like a gamble and more like a reasonable hedge. Chinese operators, primarily NewNew Shipping Line and Sea Legend, moved roughly 400,000 tonnes of container cargo through the Arctic in 2025, a 2.6-fold increase on the previous year. Not everyone is convinced.

Søren Toft, Chief Executive of Mediterranean Shipping Company, the world’s largest container line, was categorical: “The debate around the Arctic is intensifying, and commercial shipping is part of that discussion. Our position at MSC is clear. We do not, and will not use the Northern Sea Route.”

The route’s possibilities were demonstrated dramatically when the container ship Istanbul Bridge completed the first direct container connection between China and the United Kingdom via the Northern Sea Route, finishing the crossing in a record 20 days at an average speed of 16.7 knots. The same season, the vessel Newnew Polar Bear departed Shanghai on July 16 and arrived at the Russian port of Arkhangelsk in under a month, delivering 497 containers carrying auto parts, PVC film, and steel before loading Russian timber for the return leg.

South Korea is watching closely. Its Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries scheduled a September 2026 container transit to evaluate whether it could replicate China’s Arctic logistics model. South Korean shipyards already lead the world in building large ice-capable commercial vessels, and Japan has deep expertise in research icebreakers. Between them, the two countries could form a powerful North Pacific logistics network feeding into the Arctic corridor.

What Actually Drives the Route

For all the excitement about containers, the Northern Sea Route’s economic engine runs almost entirely on fossil fuels. Energy cargoes make up 83% of all traffic. Liquefied natural gas alone accounts for 58% of total volumes, crude oil for 21%, and gas condensate for roughly 4%. The port of Sabetta, the main export terminal for the massive Yamal LNG project in Siberia, handled about 90% of the route’s entire cargo turnover in 2025, moving 29.1 million tonnes.

The volume contraction in 2025 is happening precisely because these fossil fuel operations are running into serious trouble. LNG shipments fell 2.7% due to maintenance shutdowns at the Yamal plant and a shortage of the specialised ice-capable vessels needed to run them. Crude oil exports from Gazprom’s Novoportovskoye field are, in what officials diplomatically call, a ‘smooth decline’, which is a polite way of saying the oil field is running dry. Coal shipments through the route collapsed by nearly 29%.

The route’s future growth was supposed to come from two enormous new projects. Novatek’s Arctic LNG 2 was designed to produce nearly 20 million tonnes of gas a year from three production trains. Rosneft’s Vostok Oil was described as the largest new oil development on earth in two decades, holding an estimated 45 billion barrels of reserves with a target output of 115 million tonnes a year by 2033. Between them, these two projects were supposed to deliver the volumes that would justify Moscow’s infrastructure investment and its ambitious shipping targets.

Neither is producing anywhere near what was planned.

How Sanctions Broke the Dream

Western sanctions imposed following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have created a chokepoint that no icebreaker can smash through.

Arctic LNG 2 depends on a fleet of approximately 21 highly specialised Arc7 ice-class LNG carriers. These are not ordinary tankers. They are purpose-built vessels capable of navigating independently through thick Arctic ice. Russia ordered 15 of them from its domestic Zvezda shipyard. By early 2026, exactly one had been delivered. The rest of the construction programme is frozen because the shipyard cannot access the imported marine equipment, specialised cryogenic containment systems, and international financing it needs. The alternative, building them at South Korean yards, which are the world’s leading builders of such vessels, is entirely blocked by sanctions.

Four Arc4 LNG carriers were actually completed in 2024 at Hanwha Ocean in South Korea, but they are currently sitting idle off the coasts of Indonesia and Europe. Even though the European Union removed several of these vessels from its sanctions lists in July 2025, no international operator will charter them. The reputational risk and the fear of secondary sanctions are simply too great.

Arctic LNG 2 did manage to export 16 gas cargoes in late 2025, but it is operating only its first production train at a fraction of its designed capacity, often selling gas at steep discounts to Asian buyers because it has no other options. Novatek has now put all three successor projects, Arctic LNG 1, Arctic LNG 3, and Ob LNG, on indefinite hold.

Vostok Oil has not shipped a single commercial cargo.

Transporting the cargo requires a 770-kilometre pipeline to the Kara Sea, a deep-water port called Sever Bay, and a fleet of up to 50 vessels, including at least 10 Arc7 tankers. As of 2026, the pipeline is less than half built, the port is under construction, and the specialised fleet does not exist. US sanctions imposed on the project’s operator, RN-Vankor, in January 2025 further restricted access to the technology needed to move forward.

On January 1, 2027, the European Union’s ban on Russian LNG imports takes effect. In February 2026, 100% of Yamal LNG exports were still flowing into EU ports, totalling over 1.5 million tonnes in that month alone. Europe is not just a customer. It provides transshipment facilities, vessel maintenance, crew changes, and insurance services for the 14 specialised Yamalmax Arc7 carriers that run the Yamal operation. Replacing those services for Asian routes would require Novatek to source an estimated 32 to 40 additional conventional LNG carriers. Under the current sanctions environment, that is essentially impossible.

The Shadow Fleet and NATO’s Response

Russia’s workaround for the sanctions blockade has been to build a ‘shadow fleet’, a collection of ageing, poorly maintained tankers operating under obscure ownership structures, frequently flying flags of convenience, and regularly switching off or spoofing their tracking systems to hide where they are going, and where they have been.

Shadow fleets are nothing new. Iran and Venezuela have used similar arrangements to keep their oil moving. But the Arctic amplifies the risks to an entirely different level. A mechanical failure in the Mediterranean can be handled with tugs and salvage crews. The same failure in the Barents Sea, hundreds of kilometres from the nearest port, in temperatures that can kill an exposed person in minutes, is a potential catastrophe.

An oil spill from an uninsured, structurally substandard tanker in Arctic waters would be an environmental disaster on a scale that would take decades to address.

Malte Humpert, founder of The Arctic Institute, has been direct about the trajectory. “It’s not a question of if, just a matter of when,” he said of a major accident or spill.

Research shows that pollution concentrations along sections of the route are exceeding maximum permissible limits.

European nations have responded aggressively. In January 2026, fourteen European countries issued a joint declaration warning that shadow fleet tankers without valid safety documents and internationally recognised insurance would be classified as stateless vessels under international maritime law, giving coastal states the legal authority to intercept and detain them. That rhetoric quickly became action.

Belgian and French forces boarded the tanker Ethera in the North Sea on suspicion of false flagging and forged documents. French naval commandos boarded the Grinch, a crude oil tanker owned by a Moscow-based company but flying a Comoros flag, in the Alboran Sea, and escorted it to Marseille. Swedish coast guards took control of the cargo vessel Caffa in the Baltic Sea to inspect its documents and seaworthiness. These interceptions were in European waters, but they establish the legal precedent and the operational willingness to police the routes that Russian Arctic oil must use to reach global markets.

The Ice Problem Is Getting Worse, Not Better

A widely repeated assumption about Arctic shipping is that climate change is steadily melting the ice and making the route easier to navigate every year. The reality is far more dangerous.

The overall Arctic sea ice maximum in winter 2026 reached 14.278 million square kilometres in March, tying the 2025 record as the lowest ever recorded in 47 years of satellite data. But within that global picture, regional behaviour was violent and unpredictable. A persistent, unstable polar jet stream drove fierce Arctic winds that expanded sea ice in the eastern Bering Sea by 60% in just two weeks.

The ice pushed abnormally far south, blocking the False Pass shipping channel in the Aleutians, and extending down to within 30 miles of Unimak Pass, a vital route for westbound commercial vessels heading into the Pacific.

Ships facing this kind of ice do not just risk damage from the ice itself. Wind-driven sea spray at near-freezing temperatures instantly freezes onto a vessel’s hull and superstructure, building up hundreds of tons of ice that can alter the ship’s centre of gravity, and capsize it.

The logistical consequences were severe. AIS tracking data from March 2026 showed that commercial vessels entirely abandoned the ice-choked Unimak Pass. Traffic through the alternative Amukta Pass surged by 800% year-on-year. Routes plotted entirely south of the Aleutian Islands saw an 88% increase in traffic as shipmasters chose longer journeys to guarantee they would arrive at all.

This matters enormously for the viability of the Northern Sea Route as a container shipping corridor. Modern container logistics depend on precision scheduling, with arrival times calculated to the hour. A route capable of generating a 60% ice expansion across a critical chokepoint in a fortnight is fundamentally incompatible with the reliability that global supply chains require. Research has also identified a correlation between ocean heat flowing into the Arctic through the Bering Strait and sea ice conditions across the following summer, meaning that conditions a year ahead remain difficult to predict with confidence.

Why the Maths Still Does Not Work for Containers

Even setting aside the ice anomalies and the geopolitics, the basic economics of running container ships through the Arctic are extremely challenging.

The route is shorter, there is no question about that. Rotterdam to Yokohama via the Suez Canal is roughly 12,840 nautical miles. Via the Northern Sea Route it is about 5,770 nautical miles. At 16 knots, the Suez voyage takes around 33 days; the Arctic crossing takes around 15. That is a significant saving in fuel and time.

But the savings are eaten up by a cost stack that applies to every Arctic voyage, and has no equivalent on southern routes. Mandatory icebreaker escorts charged by Russia’s state nuclear fleet operator, Rosatomflot, can easily reach $180,000 per voyage even during relatively mild autumn conditions. Insurance premiums for Arctic operations are routinely $40,000 to $50,000 higher per voyage than equivalent Suez coverage.

Bureaucratic friction adds further cost. The Suez Canal requires 48 hours’ advance notice for transit, while the Russian administration requires permit applications up to four months in advance, making it impossible to respond to the spot-market conditions that modern shipping alliances depend on. Basic permits and compliance add another $20,000 per voyage.

The per-container economics are similarly unflattering. Based on standard calculations for a vessel travelling at 16 knots and consuming 45 tonnes of fuel per day at $650 per tonne, the cost of shipping one empty container unit via the Arctic works out to roughly $648. On filled containers, factoring in directional imbalances, costs can double.

Humpert, of The Arctic Institute, sees the imbalance as structural. “The NSR will exist only as a transport route with mostly one-directional traffic,” he said. “Outside factors, such as unfavorable market conditions, varying ice levels and the lack of available Russian icebreakers, may yet dash Mr Putin’s hope to establish the route as a northern export highway.”

There is also a fundamental size problem. The Suez Canal regularly accommodates vessels carrying 24,000 containers or more. The shallow straits and narrow icebreaker-cleared channels of the Arctic limit viable vessels to roughly 2,000 to 4,000 containers. The fuel savings of a shorter journey are essentially cancelled out because the same cargo requires five or six smaller ships instead of one large one.

The Suez route also generates revenue at multiple intermediate ports along the way, places like Singapore, Colombo, Jeddah, and Piraeus, while the Arctic offers no commercial stops at all across thousands of kilometres of uninhabited coastline.

The Bigger Strategic Picture

Russia’s control of the Northern Sea Route is not purely economic. Moscow treats the route as internal national waters, requiring foreign vessels to obtain advance permission, carry Russian pilots, and pay Russian icebreaker fees. This gives Russia surveillance of foreign ships near sensitive military installations and allows its Northern and Pacific naval fleets to move without transiting NATO-monitored straits.

Russia’s official position is bullish. Vladimir Panov, Special Representative for Arctic Development at Rosatom, described a corridor in ascent: “The Northern Sea Route is developing rapidly, becoming a viable and efficient global logistics route. This is facilitated by various factors, including the development of advanced technologies, the construction of new-generation nuclear icebreakers, and growing interest from international shippers.”

Western allies have begun pushing back directly. In early 2026, the United States, Canada, and Finland launched the ICE Pact, a collaborative programme to jointly build allied icebreakers. The strategic intent is to create an escort capability that does not depend on Russian assets, allowing allied nations to accompany commercial vessels through the Northern Sea Route under international maritime law without paying Russian tariffs.

NATO simultaneously launched the Arctic Sentry framework in February 2026, integrating surveillance systems from Nordic allies to create continuous monitoring from the Baltic to the Arctic Ocean, tracking Russian military movements and providing independent navigational intelligence to commercial operators.

The Suez Canal, meanwhile, is recovering. Since the beginning of 2026 it has processed 1,315 vessels carrying a total of 56 million tonnes, generating $449 million in revenue, a marked improvement on the equivalent period a year earlier. Major carriers, including CMA CGM and Maersk, have reaffirmed their commitment to the route. As CMA CGM’s CEO put it plainly, there is no alternative to the Suez Canal.

The Northern Sea Route will continue to grow in specific, narrow circumstances for Chinese state-aligned operators willing to pay premium costs for geopolitical insulation, for Indian mineral supply chains being built outside Western and Chinese control, and for Russia’s own hydrocarbon exports when its projects eventually come back online. But the idea of the route as the next great artery of global trade remains, for now, a story about what might one day be possible rather than what is actually happening.

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According to Exxon, the plant is expected to export its first LNG cargo in Q2 2026.

“Today, we began producing LNG at our terminal in Sabine Pass, marking the completion of a significant effort to construct, commission, and start up the first LNG train,” said Alex Savva, president and CEO of Golden Pass.

He further said that once fully operational, Golden Pass will be able to produce 18 million metric tons per annum.

“Golden Pass LNG will strengthen US energy production and reinforce the nation’s role as a reliable supplier to global markets, enhancing energy security and helping meet worldwide demand,” Exxon said.

Discussing Golden Pass LNG, QatarEnergy holds a 70% stake in the project, while Exxon’s stake stands at 30%.

“Train 1, the initial production unit, will add 6 mtpa of new LNG capacity. Based on equity ownership, QatarEnergy ‌will receive just over 4 mtpa while Exxon will receive just under 2 mtpa. This milestone reflects an unwavering commitment to safety and continued progress toward full operations,” Exxon remarked further.

The development also gives a major breather to QatarEnergy, the world’s second‑largest LNG exporter, after being compelled to declare force majeure on its production activities in the Gulf region, citing the Middle East conflict, which also saw Iranian strikes upon its facilities, which account for roughly 20% of the global LNG supply. Damages to those infrastructures could leave the company without about 17% of its current output for up to five years.

The USD 10 billion Golden Pass project itself faced delays and cost overruns since construction began in 2019, including the bankruptcy of its original lead contractor.

The plant’s ability to sustain liquefaction operations and meet its commercial and strategic targets will be under the radar, as supply disruptions from Qatar have resulted in a spike in Asian LNG prices, prompting countries to turn to coal or restrict energy exports to contend with the shortages.

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