What does Qatar produce and export?

The North Field, found in 1971 off the northeast coast, is the largest known non-associated gas accumulation in the world, sitting in a Permian carbonate that continues across the maritime border into Iranian waters. It was at first a disappointment, because the search had been for oil. Turning it into an export required liquefaction, and Qatar committed to that at a scale nobody had attempted, building very large trains at Ras Laffan from the late 1990s and ordering its own fleet of oversized carriers so that the cost per unit shipped fell below what smaller projects could achieve. Qatar produced 4.4% of the world's natural gas in 2025 (Energy Institute) and held 9.4% of world natural-gas export value in 2024 (CEPII BACI).

Two decisions shaped the field's development. A moratorium on new projects held from 2005 until 2017 while the reservoir's behavior under heavy production was studied, which delayed expansion for more than a decade. And in January 2019 Qatar left the oil producers' organization it had belonged to since 1961, in order to concentrate on gas rather than on crude quotas. It still produces crude oil and, more importantly for the economics, condensate and natural gas liquids that come up with the gas and are sold separately; the revenue from those byproducts is what makes Qatari gas cheap to deliver even at long distance.

Everything else industrial follows from cheap gas at home. Fertilizer plants convert it into ammonia and urea, and Qatar held 8.8% of world urea export value in 2024 (CEPII BACI). A smelter at Mesaieed, commissioned in 2010 as a joint venture with a Norwegian producer, turns imported alumina into aluminum using gas-fired power, the same substitution of energy for ore that the Gulf states have made repeatedly. Nothing is grown at any scale: rainfall is negligible, and the country buys its food, a dependence made plain during the blockade by its neighbors between 2017 and 2021, when land supply routes closed and shipments had to be rerouted by sea and air.