QatarEnergy: LNG facilities not affected by Ras Laffan explosion

QatarEnergy released an update on Monday afternoon local time after it reported on Sunday that there was an “operational incident during the start-up of operations at Ras Laffan Industrial City which resulted in an explosion and fire at the Barzan local gas supply facility in the evening hours of Sunday.”

QatarEnergy “confirms the tragic loss of 13 lives, and that 66 people are receiving medical treatment, none of whom are in a life-threatening condition,” the company said in the update.

“The lives lost in this incident are of Indian and Pakistani nationalities, and those injured are of Qatari, Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Kenyan, Ghanaian, Tanzanian, Nigerian, and Nepalese nationalities,” it said.

QatarEnergy emphasized that this was an “operational accident and not sabotage or hostile in nature.”

According to QatarEnergy, Barzan production, which supplies domestic gas, was intentionally completely stopped since December 2025 due to “urgent maintenance requirements” and was first restarted again two days prior to the incident.

“QatarEnergy’s emergency response team and Qatar’s Civil Defense swiftly and fully extinguished the fire onsite. Work is underway to assess the damage to Barzan and neighboring facilities,” the company said.

QatarEnergy’s LNG facilities, Ras Laffan Port, other logistics operations, and QatarEnergy’s export capabilities “remain unaffected as a result of this explosion and fire,” the company said.

The company added that a full investigation to determine the cause of this incident has commenced.

Ras Laffan LNG production

QatarEnergy stopped producing LNG at its giant Ras Laffan complex on March 2 due to military attacks on its operating facilities, with Qatar’s Ministry of Defense saying that “Qatar was attacked by two drones launched from the Republic of Iran.”

The LNG producer declared force majeure to its affected LNG buyers on March 4.

After that, QatarEnergy said on March 19 that its facilities in Ras Laffan Industrial City were damaged following missile attacks.

According to QatarEnergy, the attacks damaged two LNG producing Trains 4 and 6 totaling 12.8 million tons per annum (MTPA) of production, representing approximately 17 percent of Qatar’s exports.

QatarEnergy previously said that it expects the damage to its Ras Laffan complex caused by missile strikes to cost about $20 billion a year in lost revenue and to take up to five years to repair, impacting supply to markets in Europe and Asia.

According to Kpler, a QatarEnergy LNG carrier returned to Ras Laffan last week and loaded more than 209,000 cbm of LNG, becoming the first known ballast vessel chartered by the firm to re-enter the Gulf for reloading since the conflict disrupted commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.

The vessel in question is the 216,200-cbm Al Hamla.

This follows the signing of an initial agreement by the US and Iran to stop the conflict and reopen the Strait of Hormuz.