More than fifty people were injured, and 18 were still unaccounted for as of early Monday following an explosion and a fire at Qatar’s key LNG site, Ras Laffan, due to a technical malfunction.
State firm QatarEnergy said on Monday that there was an operational incident during the start-up of operations at Ras Laffan Industrial City, which resulted in an explosion and fire at the Barzan local gas supply facility in the evening hours of Sunday, June 21, 2026.
Early on Monday local time, the Qatari Ministry of the Interior said that the total number of injured persons in the incident that occurred at a factory in Ras Laffan Industrial City had reached 54.
The Qatar International Search and Rescue Group of the Internal Security Force (Lekhwiya), in cooperation with Civil Defence teams, is conducting search operations for 18 missing persons, the ministry added.
The explosion “was caused by a technical malfunction during operations at a factory in Ras Laffan Industrial City,” it said in an earlier post.
The incident took place just as Qatar is preparing to return a large part of its LNG production to the market following the tentative reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.
Last week, Qatar started to return LNG tankers back to the Middle East in anticipation of the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, which would allow the world’s second-biggest LNG exporter to start producing and moving LNG supply again.
Qatar has been eager to restart its LNG exports, after declaring force majeure following Iranian strikes on the Ras Laffan complex in the early days of the war with the United States and Israel. QatarEnergy, which curtailed LNG output in early March before an LNG facility was hit by Iranian missiles in mid-March, last week told its customers that it could restore about 50% of its production capacity within a month after safe navigation through the Strait of Hormuz is restored. Within two months, Qatar could return 80% of its capacity, according to unnamed sources who spoke to Bloomberg.
By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com
