India’s energy crisis from the US-Israel-Iran war is not limited to crude oil. The conflict has directly hit natural gas, and the consequences are immediate.
Qatar’s Shutdown and What It Means
Half of India’s imported natural gas comes from Qatar. Attacks on Qatar’s LNG facilities have led to a total shutdown. This is not a projected risk or a worst-case scenario, it is happening now.
Qatar is one of the world’s largest liquefied natural gas exporters. India depends on Qatari LNG to meet industrial demand, power generation needs, and urban gas distribution. A sustained shutdown puts all of these under stress simultaneously.
Prices Will Move Fast
The supply cut arrives at a time when global LNG markets are already tight. With the Strait of Hormuz under threat and Iran warning ships to stay away, alternative supply routes face their own complications. Shipping insurance costs have jumped 50 percent overnight, making even available LNG cargoes significantly more expensive to move.
Higher gas costs feed into power generation expenses, which raise industrial production costs, which eventually reach consumers through goods and services prices.
“We import nearly 90 percent of the oil we consume, same for natural gas, about half of our imported natural gas comes from Qatar and attacks on their LNG facilities have led to a total shutdown,” said Dr. Kaushik Deb, Executive Director of the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC India). “And when that waterway is under threat, the impact is real.”
The Structural Problem India Can No Longer Ignore
Dr. Deb has argued that this crisis must force India to treat energy security as an urgent structural problem rather than a recurring emergency to be managed. Electrifying transport, scaling domestic biofuels, and raising domestic exploration and production are the only long-term exits from this cycle of vulnerability.
For now, India faces a hard short-term reality. One of its two primary energy import corridors, crude oil through Hormuz and LNG from Qatar, is already shut. The other is under direct military threat. What follows in the next few weeks will determine how deep the damage goes.
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