QatarEnergy, Bangladesh’s largest supplier of liquefied natural gas, has told Petrobangla it may ship only 20 of its 40 contracted cargoes in 2026, a shortfall equal to about 35% of the country’s planned imports for the year.
For Muhammed Aziz Khan, chairman of Summit Group, the warning fits a problem he has been describing for some time. His group’s power arm, Summit Power International, operates one of the two floating terminals that bring LNG into the country, a 3.8 million-tonne-per-year unit off Moheshkhali Island. In a recent essay, Aziz Khan made the case that costs like these are best contained through structural means, by “diversifying fuel supplies and reducing procurement costs through long-term contracts and expanded infrastructure”.
The price of buying gas one cargo at a time
QatarEnergy invoked force majeure during the supply disruption that followed conflict in the Middle East, then told Petrobangla’s import subsidiary that deliveries could stay at half their contracted level into 2027 and beyond. It was not alone. Oman’s OQ Trading and the US-based trader Excelerate Gas Marketing declared force majeure within days, and some kept their suspensions in place even after the Strait of Hormuz reopened, a stance Bangladeshi energy officials called difficult to justify for resellers whose own production facilities were never hit. The missing QatarEnergy cargoes alone amounted to roughly a third of the 115 shipments Bangladesh had scheduled for the year.
Covering that gap meant turning to the spot market, where a single cargo is priced against whatever the world will pay that week. The country had planned to source only 17 of its 115 cargoes from the spot market in 2026; the supplier defaults forced it to lean on that volatile channel far more heavily. Those purchases landed in the budget. Bangladesh’s LNG subsidy climbed to Tk16,600 crore, nearly three times the Tk6,000 crore originally allocated for the 2025-26 fiscal year, with officials attributing most of the increase to costly spot purchases made after long-term suppliers stepped back.
A term contract would have held its agreed price through the same shock. That difference, between a number fixed years in advance and a number set by the next available seller, is the entire economic argument for buying gas under long-term agreements rather than in the moment. The exposure runs beyond price. Spot cargoes also have to be secured in competition with every other buyer scrambling during the same disruption, so the volume itself is less certain at exactly the moment a power system needs it most.
Aziz Khan’s argument for locking in supply
Aziz Khan’s essay treats fuel procurement as one piece of a larger warning about economic stability, not as a standalone energy question. “Energy security is therefore not simply an energy issue. It is a national economic issue,” he writes. His reasoning runs through the cost of power: when fuel is bought at volatile spot prices, the expense flows into generation costs, into subsidies, and eventually into the wider budget that supports industry and households.
His prescription is to convert that volatility into something predictable. Long-term contracts fix price and volume over a horizon long enough to plan around. Expanded import and storage infrastructure gives the country a physical buffer, so a single supplier’s interruption does not force an immediate scramble on the open market. Neither idea is novel in global gas trading, and that is part of their appeal. Both are well-tested tools that larger importers already use to manage exactly the kind of disruption Bangladesh is now absorbing.
Those stakes extend past the power ministry’s ledgers. Gas fuels a large share of Bangladesh’s electricity generation and feeds its fertiliser plants and industrial boilers, so a procurement bill that swings with each Gulf disruption reaches manufacturers, exporters and the cost of electricity in homes. Aziz Khan’s argument is that a supply chain built on spot purchases imports that instability straight into the economy, whereas one anchored in term contracts and storage absorbs the shocks before they reach the factory floor. For a country that spent two decades building its industrial base on the promise of dependable power, the question of how fuel is bought now shapes how competitive its exporters can stay. The procurement desk, in that sense, is an industrial-policy instrument as much as an energy one.
Bangladesh is already moving toward term deals
The country has begun shifting in that direction, and Summit’s own operations show the pattern. In June 2024, Summit Group finalized a 15-year agreement to supply 1.5 million tonnes of LNG a year to Petrobangla, with deliveries beginning in October 2026. The state importer signed a parallel 15-year purchase agreement with Excelerate Energy, operator of the country’s other Moheshkhali terminal, for roughly 0.85 to 1 million tonnes a year starting in 2026. Both deals lock in price formulas and volumes over a horizon long enough for the buyer and the generators behind it to plan around.
Infrastructure is the harder half of the equation. Bangladesh imported seaborne gas for the first time only in 2018, when the Excelerate-operated terminal off Moheshkhali entered service; Summit’s unit followed in 2019. Those two floating units, with a combined regasification capacity of more than 8 million tonnes a year, remain the only offshore gates through which LNG currently enters the country. That concentration explains why a single supplier’s force majeure ripples so quickly into load-shedding and budget pressure, and why Aziz Khan’s call for expanded infrastructure carries weight beyond his own commercial interest. The fragility is domestic as well as foreign. Both terminals went offline for scheduled maintenance in early 2024, briefly cutting the country’s seaborne import capacity in half and showing how little slack the system carries when anything goes wrong. More import capacity and onshore storage would give Bangladesh somewhere to hold gas bought when prices are low, rather than buying into every spike as it arrives. To reduce its exposure to the Gulf, the Energy Division has also begun sounding out suppliers across Southeast Asia, Central Asia and Africa for shorter agreements that still offer more price stability than the spot market.
What the global market says about the trade-off
The wider gas market is moving the same way, which lends the argument independent support. Buyers signed more than 130 billion cubic meters of new LNG contracts in 2025, the largest volume committed in a decade, according to the International Energy Agency. That contracting surge came in a year when spot exposure proved expensive: high spot prices through the first half of 2025 held the Asian benchmark about 40% above its level a year earlier and weighed on demand across the region, the agency found.
A new wave of supply may make those long-term commitments cheaper to strike. Final investment decisions on more than 90 billion cubic meters a year of new liquefaction capacity were taken in 2025, the second-strongest year on record, with the United States accounting for the bulk of it. That supply helped pull Asian spot prices down by 17% in the second half of 2025 compared with a year earlier. The same report notes how tightly regional markets now move together, with the correlation between European and Asian benchmark prices reaching an all-time high. A disruption anywhere is quickly felt everywhere, which is the case for fixing terms while a buyer can.
Demand is not retreating. The IEA expects natural gas consumption in the Asia Pacific region to rise 4% in 2026, accounting for around half of global demand growth, as emerging economies like Bangladesh keep adding gas-fired capacity. A country expanding its reliance on imported gas while buying much of it at spot prices is taking on precisely the volatility that the rest of the import market is working to hedge away.
For Bangladesh, the math is unforgiving in a way that favors planning. Every cargo bought in a panic costs more than one secured in advance, and those marginal costs accumulate into the subsidy bill that the government is already straining to fund. Locking in supply and building the storage to hold it does not remove the country’s exposure to a turbulent global market, but it narrows the range of outcomes and takes the sharpest spikes off the table.
That is the case Aziz Khan is making, and the QatarEnergy shortfall has turned it from a policy preference into a live test.
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