Qatari Energy Minister Saad al-Kaabi said at the Oil & Money conference in London on October 8 that his country intended to carry out a major campaign to expand its LNG production capacity in the mid-2020s.
Al-Kaabi, who also serves as the head of the national oil company Qatar Petroleum, said the project would entail the construction of four LNG mega-trains to process gas from the offshore North field. These units will turn out 8 million tons per year of LNG each, so they will push Qatar’s production capacity up from 77 million tons per year to nearly 110 million tons per year, he said.
The energy minister went on to say that Qatar Petroleum intended to bring the first mega-train on stream in 2024 and then launch another new unit every three to six months. He declined to give a more specific timeline, saying that the pace of work would depend on the terms of construction contracts that have not been awarded yet.
“We are on track, but it is the construction scheduling that will determine some of that,” he was quoted as saying in a Platts report.