Qatar Moves to Reclaim Japan’s LNG Market With Major Jera Deal

QatarEnergy is expected to announce a major long-term supply agreement with the biggest power utility in Japan, allowing the world’s second-largest LNG exporter to regain some of the market share it has lost there over the past decade.

As soon as this week, QatarEnergy is set to announce a supply deal with Jera Co, Inc, the largest power generation company in the G-7 Asian economy, anonymous sources familiar with the negotiations told Bloomberg on Tuesday.

The agreement would be for QatarEnergy to supply about 3 million tons of LNG per year to Jera, according to the sources.

This would nearly double Qatari LNG supply to Japan, which was estimated at around 3.3 million tons in 2025, per vessel-tracking data compiled by Bloomberg.

To compare, in 2017, Qatar supplied about 10 million tons of LNG to Japan.

But back then, Japan was still the world’s top LNG importer and relied heavily on gas for power generation after closing all its nuclear power plants following the Fukushima disaster in 2011.

Since then, Japan has started to gradually return nuclear power capacity online, following safety inspections, while global LNG supply surged with projects in the United States and Qatar.

But the Qatari supply – unlike the flexible U.S. contracts – has very strict destination clauses prohibiting buyers from reselling cargoes. This has driven Japanese utilities to purchase LNG with more flexible delivery and pricing clauses, reducing the role of Qatar in Japanese LNG supply.

The expected QatarEnergy-Jera deal could reverse the decline of Qatari supply to Japan and also help the Gulf exporter lock in long-term sales as it has undertaken a massive expansion of its export capacity, in the world’s single largest project for an LNG capacity boost.

“The mega-projects we have launched a few years ago will more than double QatarEnergy’s LNG production from 77 million tons per annum to 160 million tons per annum, including 142 million tons per annum from Qatar’s North Field,” Qatar’s Energy Minister and QatarEnergy’s CEO, Saad Sherida Al-Kaabi, said at the LNG2026 conference in Doha earlier this week.

“Hereby, our projects will contribute about 40% of the new global LNG supplies over the next decade.”

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com