Qatar’s energy minister Saad al-Kaabi said on Monday that he was unhappy about high gas prices as customers are already feeling the effects of increasing electricity costs. However, Al-Kaabi noted that Qatar, the world’s largest LNG exporter, was unable to cool down the overheated market. He noted that Qatar had no supplies available to ease the price rally, adding that the Gulf country has maxed out its liquefaction capacity to provide all of the due quantities to customers.
However, Al-Kaabi expects gas prices to ease off slightly after Russia pledged to ramp up supplies to Europe and some LNG plants returned from outages. He also said that buyers with long-term contracts are reaping the benefits of more stable and much more reasonable prices. State-owned Qatar Energy plans to expand its LNG production from 77 million tons/year today to 127 million tons/year by 2027.
