Qatar’s Ministry of Transport announced on Sunday, via its official X account, that maritime navigation can resume immediately for all vessel types, ending a suspension that had been in place since June 29.
The pause was narrower than it first sounded. It covered leisure boats, fishing vessels, jet skis and other small craft; commercial ships covered by international maritime conventions were exempt throughout. The ministry never gave an official reason beyond public safety, but the timing told its own story. A day before the suspension, Qatar’s Interior Ministry said a Qatari citizen had been killed and an Egyptian resident injured by shrapnel from military operations in the area after their vessel went missing at sea.
That week was the most dangerous stretch since the June 17 US-Iran memorandum of understanding. Iran hit a tanker near the Strait of Hormuz with a drone, the US responded on June 27 by striking around ten Iranian military targets, and Iran fired ballistic missiles and drones at the Ali Al Salem airbase in Kuwait and the US Fifth Fleet in Bahrain on June 28. The ceasefire strained badly but held, and negotiations continued in Doha into July.
The reopening restores full activity across a maritime network anchored by Hamad Port, one of the region’s largest with a design capacity of 7.5 million containers a year, and the main gateway for Qatar’s imports of food, industrial goods and construction materials. It lands as Gulf shipping slowly normalises: war-risk insurance premiums, which had reached multiples of their pre-war levels, have started to ease, though Hormuz traffic is still running well below normal under naval escort.
The stakes for Qatar’s gas
Qatar’s ports matter most for what leaves them. The country is one of the world’s top three LNG exporters, with production capacity of roughly 77 million tons a year, and the war hit that machine directly. Iranian drone attacks halted LNG production in early March, QatarEnergy declared force majeure on some contracts, and a March 18 strike on the Ras Laffan complex knocked out an estimated 17% of capacity, with full repairs expected to take years. No laden LNG carrier crossed Hormuz for almost two months. Tankers began moving again in late May, and QatarEnergy told customers it could restore about half of capacity within a month of safe navigation resuming, with full Ras Laffan operations not expected before the end of August.
The expansion program is still running through all of it. The North Field East, North Field South and North Field West projects are the largest buildout in the industry’s history, designed to lift capacity to 126 million tons a year, with first new LNG due in the second half of 2026 and the full 126 now guided for around 2028. The longer-term target of 142 million tons, nearly 85% above today’s baseline, officially stands for before the end of 2030, though the war damage and a reported slip in North Field West’s startup make that date look ambitious.
Big number
77 million tons: Qatar’s current annual LNG production capacity, the largest single-country capacity concentrated behind one chokepoint anywhere in the world.
