Natural gas powers Qatar boom

In a shift drawing historical comparisons to the takeoff of Saudi Arabia's oil industry several decades ago, Qatar has moved swiftly in recent years to develop its huge offshore natural gas reserves - once dismissed as practically worthless because of the difficulty of transporting gas to distant markets. These moves have allowed Qatar to leap ahead of Russia and Iran, the only countries with larger reserves of natural gas, seizing new opportunities to export the fuel to markets in North America, Southern Europe and the Far East.

Andrew Brown, Royal Dutch Shell's country manager in Qatar, said that greater natural gas and oil production should result in overall daily energy production equivalent to about five million barrels of oil a day by 2012, nearly half the daily oil output of Saudi Arabia. "Over the next five years," Brown said, "Qatar is going to see an energy boom as significant as any other in the past."

It has been just a decade since the emir, Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, overthrew his father in a bloodless coup, strengthened ties with the United States and bet on an offshore natural gas reserve of 900 trillion cubic feet, or 25 trillion cubic meters, shared with Iran - the world's largest pure-natural gas reserve, which is called the North Field. The North Field was discovered by Royal Dutch/Shell in 1971 and considered useless because of the difficulties then in transporting natural gas. Political conditions stabilized and technology then helped unlock what some geologists here describe as the second-largest petroleum deposit in the world after the legendary Ghawar oil field in Saudi Arabia.

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