Qatar expects its LNG output to climb threefold by the end of the decade as new projects under construction come onstream, Oil Minister Qatari Oil Minister Abdullah Al Attiyah said.

“Today we are producing 25 million tonnes of LNG. Hopefully by 2010 we will reach 77 mln tonnes,” Attiyah said.
“We are already constructing six trains of eight million tonnes each.”
LNG is gas which has been supercooled into liquid form for transport by tanker. A single shipment can deliver enough gas to supply a city the size of London for a week.
Qatar, which has the world’s third largest natural gas reserves, hopes to be become the world’s top LNG exporter by the end of the decade.
Meanwhile, Taiwan’s stae-run Chinese Petroleum Corp has imported the island’s first Qatari LNG cargo, which was delivered on a spot basis, a CPC source said.
The 60,000-tonne cargo was delivered by the 145,00-cubic-metre LNG tanker Lusail on a spot and ex-ship basis to CPC’s Yung An terminal by Qatar’s Ras Laffan Liquefied Natural Gas Company Limited (II), said RasGas.
RasGas (II) in September last year signed a long-term Sales and Purchase Agreement with CPC for about three million tones per year (tpy), but long-term supply from Qatar to Taiwan would begin only in 2008 for a period of 25 years.
The CPC source, however, declined to reveal the price it paid for the spot Qatari cargo.
Estimates of Asian LNG prices for spot March cargoes, which were generally in short supply, ranged from the mid to high teens (per MMBtu) for shipments delivered in the beginning of the month to the low teens for those arriving in the later half of the month.
It is likely that CPC would buy more spot cargoes from Qatar later this year, the source said.
CPC, Taiwan’s monopoly LNG importer, already has a master agreement with RasGas to facilitate such deals. The master agreement provides a framework under which basic terms and conditions are already in place, leaving only price terms to be further negotiated so a cargo can be bought quickly.
CPC has bought a total of three spot LNG cargoes for the preceding winter months, all of which arrived in March, the source said.
The company is also making arrangements to import about five to six LNG cargoes this year “outside of long-term contracts”, the source added.
The cargoes would likely come from majors and producers such as Shell, Qatar and Malaysia, with which CPC has master agreements.
Taiwan is among the long-term LNG buyers affected by producer Indonesia’s persistent requests in the past couple of years for its LNG customers to cut their contractual volumes.
Reduced term supplies from Indonesia to its Asian LNG customers has resulted in more demand on the spot market by buyers who were left short.
CPC is also sourcing for LNG cargoes for 2007 in order to meet a request by national power producer Taiwan Power Corp to bring forward its supply schedule. Taipower in 2003 awarded CPC a tender for 1.68 million tpy of LNG over 25 years starting 2008 for its new 4,272 MW Tatan power plant.
The volumes to Taipower would come from CPC’s three million tpy long-term contract with RasGas.
But Taipower wants to start receiving LNG earlier than 2008 to cut its fuel costs amid the current high oil price environment.