Qatar to Give Egypt Five Shipments of LNG

The Egyptian Petroleum Minister has stated that Qatar will grant his country five shipments of natural gas to help them through the summer, when temperatures soar and electricity consumption rises in response.

Qatar’s Energy and Industry Minister, Mohammed al-Sada, said that “Qatar will supply five cargoes of liquefied natural gas as a gift to the Egyptian people during the summer months, with the first of these shipments beginning at the end of July (and continuing) until mid-September.”

Qatari Prime Minister, Sheikh Hamad bon Jassim al-Thani said that his country would extend gas supplies to Egypt as needed throughout the summer. Egypt struggles to meet its energy demands at the best of times, but demand rises in the hot summer months, and blackouts are a common occurrence.

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Egypt lacks the infrastructure to receive LNG shipments itself, meaning that Qatar cannot actually ship the natural gas directly to Egypt. Instead, Egypt will take natural gas produced by foreign companies within its borders, and then Qatar will export its LNG directly to the customers of those foreign companies as recompense.

No mention was made as to the size of the five shipments that Qatar has pledged, but assuming a typical Qatari shipment as being 210,000 cubic metres, and using the prevailing Asian spot prices for LNG, ArabianBusiness calculated that the cargoes would be worth around $321 million on the spot market.

By. Joao Peixe of Oilprice.com