Qatar Has Now Missed 56 LNG Cargoes to India, and September Is Still Not Confirmed

Petronet LNG said on August 13, 2026 that QatarEnergy has extended its force majeure on liquefied natural gas supplies through the end of August, and has given no definite plan for September. Since the declaration, 56 cargoes that Petronet had contracted from Qatar have gone undelivered.

What force majeure actually does

Force majeure is a clause in a supply contract that suspends a seller's obligation to deliver when something outside its control makes delivery impossible — war, disaster, blockade. It is not a default and it is not a cancellation. The seller does not pay damages for the missed cargoes, and the buyer does not get to treat the contract as broken. The obligation is paused, not extinguished.

That distinction is why the 56 figure needs care. Those cargoes have not been written off. Petronet's agreement with QatarEnergy runs to April 2028 and covers 7.5 million tonnes a year, and under its terms QatarEnergy can supply the missed volumes at any point before that expiry. On paper, nothing has been lost.

In practice, a cargo that arrives in 2027 does not heat a home or run a fertiliser plant in August 2026. Petronet is left sourcing replacement gas on the spot market at whatever it costs on the day, and the difference between the contract price and the spot price is a real cost regardless of what the contract says about eventual delivery. A suspended obligation and a met obligation are not the same thing to anyone downstream.

Where the disruption comes from

QatarEnergy halted LNG production in early March after Iranian attacks on its Ras Laffan facilities, and declared force majeure at that point. Ras Laffan is where effectively all of Qatar's LNG is liquefied and loaded, so a stoppage there is not a partial constraint on exports — it is the export programme.

The second constraint is the route. Qatari LNG leaves the Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz, and our own tape carried a UKMTO report on the same day that tanker transits through the strait were limited to single digits in both directions, with commercial traffic remaining at reduced levels. Even production that restarts has to get out through a waterway that is currently moving a fraction of its normal volume.

Those two facts compound rather than substitute. Restoring output at Ras Laffan does not by itself restore deliveries to India if the ships cannot reliably sail.

Why the monthly pattern matters

The shape of these notices is itself information. QatarEnergy has been issuing force majeure notices month by month rather than declaring a single suspension with an end date. Petronet's position on August 13 — covered through August, nothing confirmed for September — is the fifth month of that rhythm.

A seller who knew when supply would resume would say so, because a defined outage lets buyers plan replacement purchases and lets the seller keep commercial credibility. Renewing monthly is what a seller does when it does not know either. For a buyer that is arguably worse than a long declared outage: Petronet cannot commit to spot cargoes far ahead in case Qatari volumes resume, and cannot rely on Qatari volumes in case they do not.

Petronet shares fell about 4% on the supply uncertainty. The story is no longer principally about a single missed shipment; it is about an import programme that has spent five months unable to forecast its largest contracted source.