The Australian: No plan to lift Qatar LNG capacity

Australia’s great rival in the global liquefied natural gas trade, the tiny Gulf state of Qatar, is considered unlikely to expand its export capacity in the next few years beyond its current 77 million tonnes a year (mtpa).

Its focus instead will be on the $10 billion Barzan offshore gas project that state-owned Qatar Petroleum is developing in the Arabian Gulf with ExxonMobil. Barzan will pipe 1.5 billion cubic feet a day of natural gas 80km under the sea to Ras Laffan Industrial City, where two new gas processing trains will provide energy for Qatar’s domestic power and water sectors.

At full capacity, the two trains will handle the equivalent of about 11.5 million tonnes a year.

Qatar is the world’s biggest LNG exporter but will relinquish the No 1 spot to Australia by about 2017-18 if the three Gladstone LNG plants, the Darwin-based Ichthys development, and the Gorgon, Wheatstone and Prelude projects on the North West Shelf all come to fruition on schedule. That would lift Australia’s export capacity from 24.2 mtpa now to about 85 mtpa.

In an economic outlook released last week, Qatar National Bank said it expected hydrocarbon production to “continue plateauing in the medium term”. MORE