LNG Industry: The Biggest Winners of the Iran War

This conflict has been a seismic event for the foundations of the global LNG industry. When Iran chose to respond to the US-Israeli strikes by targeting Gulf energy infrastructure, Qatar made an immediate call: on March 2, QatarEnergy ceased all natural gas production following the first Iranian drone strikes on Ras Laffan and Mesaieed, declaring force majeure across its entire buyer portfolio. That represented a severe but, in theory, reversible disruption. The dominant market hypothesis was that once the conflict wound down, Iranian strikes ceased, and the Strait of Hormuz reopened, Qatar would resume production within weeks.

What happened on March 18 destroys that hypothesis. The missile strikes this week physically disabled two liquefaction trains and one of Qatar’s two gas-to-liquids plants — sidelining 12.8 million tonnes per year of export capacity, or 17% of the country’s total output. The estimated repair period is three to five years. QatarEnergy’s CEO Saad al-Kaabi confirmed $20 billion in lost annual revenue and $26 billion in repair costs. For context: Qatar is, alongside the US, the world’s largest LNG exporter. Ras Laffan produces approximately 20% of global LNG supply. The physical damage decouples Qatar’s production recovery from any diplomatic resolution of the conflict — even if Hormuz reopened tomorrow, the damaged trains cannot be rebuilt in weeks.

This transforms the nature of the shock. What was a flow disruption with an expiry date has become a structural supply deficit of at minimum three to five years’ duration. Our working assumption is that there will be no further large-scale attacks on energy infrastructure specifically (the inflationary impact on Europe and the humanitarian consequences in emerging Asia make further escalation in this dimension politically untenable for all parties), but the timeline for Hormuz reopening and Qatari exports resuming remains entirely uncertain.

The New LNG Market Equilibrium (Before and After)

To understand the magnitude of the change, we need to anchor to where the market stood eight weeks ago. At that point, despite the cold weather pushing TTF higher, the fundamental narrative was one of structural oversupply: the post-Russia/Ukraine wave of infrastructure investment had delivered significant new capacity, and the forward curve was pricing in a steady normalisation. The TTF forward curve pointed to normalisation around €25/MWh ($8.5/MMBtu) by 2028. The TTF–Henry Hub differential had compressed from the 2022 peaks to ~$3.5/MMBtu by end-2025. US LNG was growing from 108 MTPA toward 140–150 MTPA by 2028–29, Qatar was massively expanding the North Field, and Chinese demand was structurally contained. That was the map. It no longer exists.

The 1Q27 print of €57.44/MWh (~$18.2/MMBtu) is the most important data point for Venture Global’s near-term earnings. The Q2 2027 print of €45/MWh marks where the market is pricing in partial supply recovery — but still at nearly double the pre-war assumption. The Cal 2028 at €32.11 tells us the market doesn’t believe the shock is permanent, but has accepted a materially higher structural floor.

The market is also implicitly pricing a scenario where the North Field Expansion — Qatar’s project to add ~49 MTPA of new capacity — proceeds broadly on schedule once the conflict ends. If the expansion timeline slips significantly due to the physical state of Ras Laffan or continued geopolitical uncertainty, the 2028+ curve would need to reprice upward again. That remains the key unresolved question in the long end of the curve.

Iran War Scenarios and Their Impact on Golar LNG, Venture Global and NextDecade

Today, we take an in-depth look at:

• The potential scenarios and implications for the industry

While also updating our valuation and assessing how the impact differs materially across:

• Golar LNG
• Venture Global
• NextDecade