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Iranian missile strikes have knocked out 17% of Qatar's liquefied natural gas (LNG) export capacity, causing an estimated $20 billion in lost annual revenue and forcing QatarEnergy to declare force majeure on long-term contracts for up to five years, QatarEnergy CEO and Qatar's Minister of State for Energy Affairs Saad al-Kaabi told Reuters on Thursday.
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Kaabi said two of Qatar's 14 LNG trains and one of its two gas-to-liquids facilities were damaged in the strikes.
The repairs will sideline 12.8 million tons per year of LNG capacity for three to five years. The damaged units cost approximately $26 billion to build, he said.
Shell is a partner in the damaged GTL facility, which will take up to a year to repair.
U.S. oil major ExxonMobil holds a 34% stake in the damaged LNG train S4 and a 30% stake in train S6. Train S4 impacts supplies to Italy's Edison and EDFT in Belgium, while train S6 impacts South Korea's KOGAS, EDFT, and Shell in China.
QatarEnergy will declare force majeure on long-term contracts for up to five years for LNG supplies bound for Italy, Belgium, South Korea and China.
"These are long-term contracts that we have to declare force majeure. We already declared, but that was a shorter term. Now it's whatever the period is," Kaabi added.
QatarEnergy had already declared force majeure on its entire LNG output after earlier attacks on its Ras Laffan production hub, which came under fire again on Wednesday. "For production to restart, first we need hostilities to cease," Kaabi said.
The fallout extends well beyond LNG.
Qatar's exports of condensate will drop by approximately 24%, liquefied petroleum gas will fall 13%, helium output will fall 14%, and naphtha and sulfur will both drop by 6%, Kaabi said.
Those losses have implications ranging from LPG used in restaurants in India to helium used by South Korean chipmakers.
"The scale of the damage from the attacks has set the region back 10 to 20 years," Kaabi said.
Kaabi expressed shock at the attacks, saying, "I never in my wildest dreams would have thought that Qatar would be, Qatar and the region, in such an attack, especially from a brotherly Muslim country in the month of Ramadan attacking us in this way."
He also issued a broad call for all parties to respect energy infrastructure.
"If Israel attacked Iran, it's between Iran and Israel. It has nothing to do with us and the region. And so now, in addition to that, I'm saying that everybody in the world, whether it's Israel, whether it's the U.S., whether it's any other country, everybody should stay away from oil and gas facilities," Kaabi said.
He added that the image of Qatar and the region as a safe haven "has been shaken."
Qatar's North Field expansion project, which could represent some of the largest energy investments in the world, has no work currently taking place and could be delayed for more than a year, Kaabi said.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated on Thursday that he believes pipelines should be built to transport Middle East oil and gas across the Arabian Peninsula and up to Israeli ports to avoid threats by Iran in the Strait of Hormuz and other Gulf waters.
Netanyahu made the remarks a day after Israel attacked Iran's South Pars field, which triggered retaliatory strikes on energy plants across the Gulf and sent energy prices spiraling.
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