Qatar's damaged liquefied natural gas production could take until the first quarter of next year to fully repair, Shell said on Thursday, as the first Qatari LNG tanker in three weeks sailed through the Strait of Hormuz.
Chief financial officer Sinead Gorman told reporters, as cited by Bloomberg, that sections of Shell's Pearl gas-to-liquids plant hit by a missile strike during the Middle East conflict should be back in service by the first quarter of 2027. However, unaffected units at the facility could restart as soon as shipping lanes reopen. Despite that, Shell's guidance for the third quarter assumes zero output from Qatar, a sign of how uncertain the timeline for a full resumption remains.
Shell holds a 30 per cent stake in QatarEnergy LNG's fourth expansion train at Ras Laffan, equivalent to 2.4 million tonnes a year of equity production, a facility that has continued operating throughout the disruption. Chief executive Wael Sawan, speaking to Bloomberg Television, described the power cut as a short-term event rather than a structural one, while Ms Gorman had earlier this year flagged Qatar as the single biggest swing factor in the group's gas output.
QatarEnergy shut in production across its LNG facilities on March 2 and later declared force majeure, a step that has weighed heavily on Shell's Integrated Gas division, where production fell 31 per cent quarter-on-quarter, and LNG liquefaction slipped 2 per cent.
The disruption eased slightly on Thursday, when the Al Areesh, a QatarEnergy-linked LNG carrier that loaded at Ras Laffan in early July, sailed through the Strait of Hormuz and into the Gulf of Oman. It was the first such transit since a sister vessel, the Al Rekayyat, was struck in the waterway three weeks earlier.
Despite the Qatari power cut, Shell's second-quarter profit surged to its highest level since the Ukraine war. Adjusted earnings were $9.8 billion, more than double a year earlier and ahead of Bloomberg-assessed analyst forecasts of $8.7 billion as trading and refining gains from the wider Middle East conflict outweighed the losses in gas production.
