Armageddon attack on Qatari plant could keep energy prices high around the world: analysts

Damage to a critical Qatari facility is threatening to keep energy prices high around the world even if the war in Iran ends soon in what some analysts are calling an “Armageddon” situation.Qatar’s Las Raffan plant supplies a fifth of the world’s liquefied natural gas, which is used for electricity, heating and cooking – but Iranian strikes have damaged the facility, worsening what is already the largest-ever energy supply disruption.“I woke up this morning and thought, ‘No, please no,’” Anne-Sophie Corbeau, former head of gas analysis at BP now at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, told the Financial Times. “This has always been my nightmare scenario, my Armageddon scenario, the one I didn’t want to happen.”Gas prices in Europe spiked 30% as markets reopened, having more than doubled since the start of the war, while some gas stations in Asia have already imposed fuel rations to combat shortages.“It is apocalypse now.The coming months for gas importers are going to be a bloodbath,” Laurent Segalen, a clean energy investment banker, told the FT. Europe and Asia will bear the brunt of the new supply disruption, but it will eventually ripple across the globe – likely hitting the US in about two months, according to Joe Adamski, managing director of ProcureAbility, a supply chain consultancy.“Because all petroleum-based, all fossil fuel-based economics are global in nature, it will eventually flow back…It will affect the availability of the supply even back here in the US,” Adamski told The Post.Analysts have warned that energy shocks tend to ripple across consumer prices, potentially reheating overall inflation – not just prices at the pump.“Everything is going to get more expensive because of it, because oil underlies our economy,” Adamski said.

“It’s involved in the transportation of everything.It’s involved in the production of food.

It’s involved in the production of many of the goods we us...