Ras LaffanPosts by

On 10 May 2026, the Qatari LNG carrier Al Kharaitiyat transited Hormuz on the Tehran-approved corridor to Pakistan under a government-to-government LNG arrangement. The transit is the cleanest available case study of the bilateral carve-out pattern. This post reads the transit in detail, explains why the bilateral mechanism cannot scale to the broader LNG market, and identifies what an institutional default would replace it with.

No loaded LNG tanker has exited Hormuz since late February. Qatar’s seventy-seven million tonne capacity at Ras Laffan, roughly twenty percent of global LNG, has no pipeline alternative. Shell declared force majeure 11 March. Full operations are not expected until August. The governance question is whether the eight-week vacuum becomes a sixteen-week vacuum.