Armageddon Scenario.
Don't worry. Be a Finn.
“News Items is the first thing I read every morning.” — Jack Leslie, former chairman of Weber Shandwick and Adjunct Professor, Georgetown Global Health Institute.
1. Iran hit the site of the world’s largest liquefied natural gas facility in Qatar with a ballistic missile, inflicting “extensive damage” in retaliation for an Israeli attack on the Islamic republic’s South Pars gasfield. The attacks mark a significant escalation in the Middle East war and threaten major repercussions for global energy markets. Qatar is the second-largest exporter of LNG in the world, and the biggest supplier to Asia. Qatar’s defence ministry said on X that Iran had fired five ballistic missiles, with four intercepted and one hitting Ras Laffan, a huge industrial complex that is home to state-owned QatarEnergy’s LNG plants and a fuel refinery. It is also the location of Shell’s $18 billion Pearl GTL plant, which turns gas into chemical feedstocks and fuel. “Emergency teams were deployed immediately to contain the resulting fires, as extensive damage has been caused,” QatarEnergy said on X. (Source: ft.com)
2. As emergency workers sifted through the smouldering wreckage at Qatar’s Ras Laffan complex on Thursday morning, traders in Europe and Asia were waking up to a fresh energy crisis. In normal times, a fifth of the world’s supply of liquefied natural gas (LNG) flows from Ras Laffan, a vast industrial site almost three times the size of Paris built over three decades at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars. LNG terminals are some of the biggest and most complex constructions in human history, and Ras Laffan is the largest of them all, turning Qatar’s huge gas reserves into a super-chilled fuel that can be shipped around the world. At least before the Iranian missiles arrived. “I woke up this morning and thought, ‘No, please no,’” said Anne-Sophie Corbeau, a former head of gas analysis at BP who is now at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy. “This has always been my nightmare scenario, my Armageddon scenario, the one I didn’t want to happen.” (Source: ft.com)
