QatarEnergy Locks In 3 Million Tons of US LNG From Woodside

QatarEnergy has agreed to buy 3 million tons of LNG a year from Woodside Energy for twenty years, a deal that makes the Qatari state firm the single largest buyer of American LNG. It's a striking sentence, and it's accurate: the world's dominant exporter is now shopping aggressively in someone else's shop.

The volumes come from the Louisiana LNG project, due to finish construction by 2029, with deliveries to Qatar starting in 2030. The sale covers roughly 18% of the facility's planned capacity of 16.5 million tons per year — for context, that's a fifth of a Ras Laffan's annual export volume, compressed into one Gulf Coast plant.

"These additional volumes make QatarEnergy the largest buyer of LNG from the US," President and CEO Saad Sherida Al-Kaabi said, framing the purchase as support for the company's "long-term growth and diversification strategy."

The Woodside contract lands just a week after QatarEnergy signed with Cheniere Energy for 4 million tons annually, starting in the early 2030s and running through 2054. Together the two deals add 7 million tons a year of US supply to Qatar's future portfolio. Woodside, meanwhile, adds another long-tenured foundation customer to Louisiana LNG, having already signed a 13-year, 1-million-ton-per-year deal with Germany's Uniper from the same facility.

Why is the top LNG exporter buying LNG?

The answer sits in the Persian Gulf. Some capacity at QatarEnergy's Ras Laffan complex was damaged in the early days of the Iran war, and repairs will take years. If the conflict drags on, expansion projects there could slip too.

The numbers explain the urgency. Ras Laffan exported 82 million tons of LNG in 2025 — roughly a fifth of the entire global trade. Even undamaged trains are running below potential because shipping through the Strait of Hormuz remains risky. More Qatari cargo left the region in October than in September, according to BloombergNEF, but traders are watching for fresh disruption if Washington renews strikes against Iran after next week's midterm elections.

The force majeure notice tells its own story. QatarEnergy has extended it on deliveries to some European and Asian buyers through the end of the year — customers who signed Qatari contracts and are now, in effect, being supplied from wherever Qatar can find molecules.

What does this change for the market?

For US producers, it's another stamp of approval on Gulf Coast capacity and a reminder that American LNG now anchors even rival exporters' portfolios. For Qatar's customers in Europe and Asia, it's a hedge: the volumes arrive from 2030 at the earliest, so they don't fix near-term shortfalls, but they suggest Qatar intends to honor commitments even when Hormuz complicates things.

For QatarEnergy itself, the strategy has a certain symmetry. It holds a joint venture in the Golden Pass LNG terminal in Texas, still in startup and eventually expected to produce 18 million tons a year. Add Golden Pass, Cheniere and Woodside together and the company is weaving a second supply base an ocean away from its damaged home infrastructure.

Neither US deal, it's worth noting, actually replaces the volumes locked inside the Gulf. Seven million tons a year against an 82-million-ton export base leaves a considerable gap. What the deals do is buy time, optionality and a very long runway — through 2054 in Cheniere's case, which is a contract length that assumes remarkably stable geopolitics.

Expect more of this. If Hormuz risk persists, QatarEnergy's US shopping spree looks less like diversification for its own sake and more like the new operating model.