QatarEnergy has moved the start-up of the first North Field East liquefaction train to the end of 2026 at the earliest, days after signing 27-year and 20-year supply agreements with JERA and Petronas in Doha. The expansion will take Qatari capacity from 77 million tonnes a year to 142 million by 2030, but nothing has been added to global supply yet.
QatarEnergy has pushed the start-up of the first liquefaction train at its North Field East project back to the end of 2026, days after using the industry's largest gathering in Doha to sign another round of long-term supply contracts for the gas that expansion is meant to deliver.
The revised timing moves first LNG from the middle of this year, the target Saad Sherida al-Kaabi, Qatar's Minister of State for Energy Affairs and QatarEnergy's president and chief executive, had held to through most of 2025, to the fourth quarter at the earliest, with the risk of slipping into early 2027. Bloomberg reported the change on 9 February. The delay does not alter the size of what is being built. It alters when the rest of the market feels it.
The size is what matters to everyone outside Qatar. QatarEnergy produces about 77 million tonnes a year of LNG and intends to reach 142 million tonnes by 2030. North Field East accounts for 32 million tonnes across four mega trains of eight million tonnes each; North Field South adds 16 million tonnes across two more; North Field West, the last phase to be sanctioned, adds a further 16 million. Counting the Golden Pass terminal on the Texas Gulf coast, which QatarEnergy owns with ExxonMobil, the company will control roughly 160 million tonnes a year of liquefaction capacity by the end of the decade. That is an increase of about 85 percent in Qatari capacity inside six years, from a producer that already competes with the United States and Australia for first place in the trade. No other single company is adding volume on anything like that scale.
The contracting has run well ahead of the steel. At LNG2026, the twenty-first International Conference and Exhibition on Liquefied Natural Gas, held in Doha in the first week of February, Japan's JERA signed a 27-year sale and purchase agreement for three million tonnes a year, with deliveries beginning in 2028. Malaysia's Petronas signed its first long-term agreement with QatarEnergy, taking up to two million tonnes a year over 20 years.
Both deals are notable less for their volume than for their duration. Qatar has spent four years refusing to sell expansion volumes on the shorter terms European utilities wanted, on the argument that a project of this capital intensity has to be underwritten for decades rather than years. Buyers who held out have largely come back on Qatari terms. JERA, Japan's largest power generator, has now committed to buying Qatari gas into the 2050s.
The direction of travel is east. Japanese and Malaysian offtake, alongside the Chinese and Indian contracts signed earlier in the expansion, points at a portfolio being rebuilt around Asian demand growth rather than European replacement demand. Europe took Qatari cargoes in volume after 2022 but resisted the structures Doha insisted on, and the continent's own demand outlook makes multi-decade commitments awkward to justify. The consequence, visible in this month's signings, is that the marginal tonne of new Qatari LNG is being contracted into Asia, leaving European buyers more exposed to the spot market at the point when the market's balance turns.
What the expansion does to the wider supply picture is more contested. Volumes from North Field East, South and West land in the same window as a heavy wave of new American capacity, and a substantial body of analysis expects the global market to be comfortably supplied, arguably oversupplied, from 2027 onwards. Qatar's position is that low production costs and a long-lived resource let it sell through a soft market that would strand higher-cost projects elsewhere. That thesis has not yet been tested at volume.
The North Field is the offshore extension of the world's largest non-associated gas field, shared with Iran, and the expansion draws on reserves Qatar held back for more than a decade under a self-imposed moratorium lifted in 2017. The economics rest on that geology: wells that yield condensate and liquids alongside gas, a short pipeline run to shore, and a plant site at Ras Laffan that already exists and already works.
The delay itself is an execution matter rather than a commercial one. Ras Laffan is running the largest LNG construction programme ever attempted on a single site, with three phases overlapping, and the schedule has been squeezed by late engineering changes and equipment supply. Most of the volume sold under the new contracts is scheduled to begin later in the decade, which gives QatarEnergy room. Buyers with nearer-term delivery windows have less of it.
For now the number that counts is unchanged. Qatar's exportable capacity is still 77 million tonnes a year, and stays there until the first North Field East train runs. Every contract signed this month is a claim on gas that does not yet exist.