State-run Qatar Petroleum issued an invitation to tender for the chartering of LNG carriers for its future LNG shipping requirements, including its ongoing expansion projects in the North Field, it said on March 20.  

The invitation to tender, which was issued “to a large group of LNG ship owners”, also covers the requirements for the LNG volumes that will be produced from the Golden Pass LNG export project in the US. It also includes options to replace time charters for a number of Qatar's LNG carriers that will expire in the next few years. 

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Qatar Petroleum said that upon receiving the responses to the tender, it will review bidders’ technical and commercial capabilities with the objective of assigning selected ship owners to the shipyards’ construction slots, which were previously reserved at a number of Chinese and Korean shipyards. 

The company in April 2020 had reserved capacity at China's Hudong-Zhonghua shipyard to build LNG carriers. In June it struck a trio of deals worth $19bn to reserve capacity for the construction of LNG carriers at South Korean shipyards. Under the deals, it book "a major portion" of the LNG shipbuilding capacity of South Korea's top three yards, Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering, Hyundai Heavy Industries and Samsung Heavy Industries, through 2027.

Qatar is planning to develop the North Field East (NFE) project, the world’s largest LNG project, which will raise its LNG production capacity from 77mn metric tons/year to 110mn mt/yr. The NFE project represents the first phase of LNG expansion in Qatar, while the second phase, referred to as the North Field South project (NFS), will further increase Qatar’s LNG production capacity from 110mn mt/yr to 126mn mt/yr.   

Qatar Petroleum and ExxonMobil are developing the 18mn mt/year Golden Pass export terminal which is expected to be operational by the middle of this decade.