Report: RasGas postpones layoffs amid Qatar rift

Qatari LNG producer RasGas has reportedly pushed back a round of job cuts after the diplomatic crisis which erupted between Qatar and several of its Middle East neighbors in early June.

Staff at the LNG producing giant were told earlier this year that they would be laid off in June, with the job cuts following last year’s decision by state-owned Qatar Petroleum to merge RasGas with Qatargas, Reuters informed on Wednesday.

However, in a company email last month staff were informed that the job cuts had been delayed, the news agency reported citing two Rasgas employees as saying.

It was not immediately clear whether the delay meant the entire merger had been postponed.

LNG World News contacted RasGas to comment on the report. We will update the article once we receive a response.

Qatar Petroleum’s chief executive Saad Sherida Al-Kaabi said in December last year the merger of RasGas and Qatargas, Qatar’s number one and two LNG producers respectively, would help to cut operating costs by hundreds of millions of dollars.

Qatargas is the largest LNG producing company in the world, with an annual production capacity of 42 million tonnes per annum. RasGas has a production capacity of about 37 million tonnes a year.

Both of the LNG producers are majority owned by Qatar Petroleum. US-based energy giant ExxonMobil has a 30 percent stake in RasGas.

An official working at a Gulf energy company told Reuters on Wednesday that Doha was apparently postponing the layoffs because it needed to focus the attention of leaders and managers on the diplomatic crisis, which has disrupted some imports into the country.

“I still think the job cuts will happen in the long run, as the Rasgas-Qatargas merger will go ahead and many of the jobs are duplicated across both organizations,” the official told Reuters.

Worth mentioning, Qatar Petroleum said recently it aims to raise Qatar’s LNG production from 77 million to 100 million mt per year.

The new additional volumes will be secured by doubling the size of the new gas project in the southern sector of the North Field, which Qatar Petroleum had announced last April.

Qatar is facing a growing competition from a tide of new LNG sources mostly coming from Australia and the US.

This move shows that Qatar is not willing to easily let go the title of world’s largest LNG exporter.

LNG World News Staff