There have been reports in the market of downtime at Qatargas's LNG facilities, which could be potentially concerning given the tightness in the LNG and the helium markets at present. Qatar's Train 6 and Train 7 LNG facilities (15.6mmtpa in total or 20% of Qatar's capacity) are reportedly down at present: however we know that T6 was expected to go down for planned maintenance in Q1 from ConocoPhillips commentary and this may be the case with T7 also. Reports from Reuters suggest that the T6 outage was in fact unplanned maintenance. There does not seem to have been anything major such as a fire at the plants. Flow data does show that volumes from Qatar have dropped sharply in recent days but have fallen much lower in previous years.
Qatar Outages add to Helium Supply Worries
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