Fifty-four people were injured and 18 were missing after an explosion occurred at a factory in Qatar's Ras Laffan Industrial City.
An "operational incident" during the start-up of operations at Ras Laffan Industrial City led to an explosion and fire at the Barzan local gas supply centre on Sunday evening, operator QatarEnergy said.
Emergency response teams were sent immediately to contain the fire, which was now under control, it said on social media.
The Interior Ministry said the Qatar International Search and Rescue Group along with civil defence teams were conducting search operations for those missing.
"The incident was caused by a technical malfunction during operations at a factory in Ras Laffan Industrial City," the ministry said. It added that there were "no leaks posing a threat to public safety".
Commissioned in 2022, the Barzan complex supplies pipeline gas domestically. It can provide 1.4 billion standard cubic feet per day of gas to local power generation and water desalination plants, as well as local industries, QatarEnergy says on its website.
Barzan also has the capacity to supply associated hydrocarbon products such as ethane, condensate and sulphur for local markets and export. Ras Laffan Industrial City, 80km north-east of Doha, is near the North Field. About 115,000 people work at the facility, QatarEnergy's website says.
"Start-up and restart are among the highest-risk phases in any gas processing operation: the plant is being brought from a non-steady state back into stable running, which places unusual demands on equipment, instrumentation and process control," said Pat Breen, chairman and chief executive of Gas Strategies.
"It is often the point at which latent issues surface, which is precisely why restarts are carried out slowly, in stages, and with considerable operational discipline."
QatarEnergy is a "highly capable operator with a strong safety record", particularly in LNG, and Ras Laffan has a "well-drilled emergency response capability that will have been activated immediately", Mr Breen said.
"Even so, the incident is a reminder of the inherent hazards of gas-processing – complex, high-energy systems in which risk is most acute during non-routine operations such as start-up."
He also stressed that it would be premature to speculate on the cause or wider implications ahead of the detailed technical findings.
Attacks on site
Ras Laffan, the world's largest liquefied natural gas (LNG) refinery, was hit by Iranian missile strikes in March, which severely destroyed parts of the complex. The complex supplies one fifth of the world's super-chilled fuel.
QatarEnergy said at the time that the strikes damaged Trains 4 and 6, removing 12.8 million tonnes a year, equal to about 17 per cent of Qatar's LNG exports from the market, and one of the two trains at the Pearl gas-to-liquids (GTL) complex.
The company at the time said that the affected LNG trains would take three to five years to fully repair and that the Pearl GTL outage would last at least a year.
QatarEnergy declared long-term force majeure on contracts with buyers in China, South Korea, Italy and Belgium. The company’s chief executive, Saad Al Kaabi, put annual lost revenue at $20 billion and estimated repairs would take three to five years.
Qatar is the world’s second-largest exporter of LNG, with Asian markets among its main buyers. QatarEnergy has been seeking to restore production at the complex and is expected to boost output once the Strait of Hormuz is fully reopened.
12-week wait
It will take Qatar 12 weeks from June 19 to bring its operational trains back to capacity, according to the base case view of consultancy Wood Mackenzie.
"Using satellite imagery, we have observed heat signals across multiple LNG trains at the North facility at Qatar’s Ras Laffan complex in recent months," said Tom Marzec-Manser, director - Europe gas & LNG at Wood Mackenzie.
"Since the middle of May we have also witnessed heat at the South facility which is where the two trains were damaged."
While a heat signature alone "does not imply outright LNG production", it does show that QatarEnergy is preparing to restart as quickly as possible, he said.
However, shipping will remain the bottleneck, Mr Marzec-Manser said. "Normal transit of the Strait of Hormuz has yet to be resumed and there are only so many vessels that can be loaded at once."
