QatarEnergy has signed two long term sale and purchase agreements with Cheniere Energy to buy up to four million tonnes a year of liquefied natural gas from the United States. The agreements were announced on 22 October 2026 and tie one volume to the Sabine Pass terminal in Louisiana and the other to Corpus Christi in Texas.
Deliveries are on a free on board basis and are anticipated to begin in 2031 and to run through 2054. No contract value and no fixed fee were disclosed by either party.
Saad bin Sherida Al Kaabi, Minister of State for Energy Affairs and president and chief executive of the state producer, said the signing of the two agreements marks an important milestone in the company's LNG strategy. Jack Fusco, chairman, president and chief executive of the seller, signed for it.
The world's largest exporter is buying
The direction of this transaction is what makes it significant. Qatar is the benchmark long term LNG seller, and a 23 year commitment to purchase American volume is not a supply decision in the ordinary sense. It is a portfolio decision: it gives the Qatari producer Atlantic basin molecules it can place into European and Latin American markets without routing them through the Strait of Hormuz, and it does so on a pricing basis linked to a different benchmark from the one its own sales are struck against.
What it prices in
Read as a hedge, the agreements put a number on how a producer with perfect information about its own export route values the risk attached to that route. Utilities and industrial buyers negotiating their own long term supply over the next two years will find that judgement more informative than any analyst estimate of the same risk.
Two cautions for readers tracking this market. These agreements are distinct from the separate purchase the Qatari company signed with another counterparty for Louisiana volume about a week later, and the two should not be merged. A portion of the Sabine Pass volume is reported to be conditional on a final investment decision for that terminal's next expansion phase, a condition that appears in secondary coverage rather than in the announcement itself.
