Middle East War Forces Emergency LNG Transfers

The ongoing war in the Middle East continues to disrupt global natural gas supplies, forcing Qatar and the UAE to resort to emergency ship-to-ship LNG transfers.

This costly workaround involves transferring damaged or incident-prone tankers via ship-to-ship transfers off Oman and the UAE, adding over $1 million per transfer and up to 35 hours of extra sailing time.

The QatarEnergy-run Al Rekayyat, which was struck by a projectile near Hormuz in July, transferred its cargo to the Qatari tanker Tembek off the UAE coast. Tembek later delivered the LNG to India.

Bogdan Ratiu, commercial and shipping director at LNG Synergy, said most of these recent operations were emergency transfers rather than routine commercial transfers.