The buffer held. Whether that buffer can be drawn on twice, and at what price to the plants and exporters that provided it, is the question the market has not yet had to answer.
The international LNG market lost about 45 million metric tons of supply between March and September 2026 as a result of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, according to the secretary general of the Gas Exporting Countries Forum, Philip Mshelbila. Speaking at the ADIPEC conference in Abu Dhabi, Mshelbila put the figure at "somewhere about 45 million tons of LNG that did not come to market as a result of issues on the Strait of Hormuz," TASS reports.
The headline number is large, but the more consequential part of Mshelbila's assessment is what happened next. Of those 45 million tonnes, roughly 39 million were replaced by supply from elsewhere, "mainly from North America, but also from other regions as well," he said. That implies the market absorbed the overwhelming majority of the shortfall rather than going short outright.
Three mechanisms did the work, according to the GECF chief. New liquefaction capacity came on stream; maintenance was deferred at plants that were already producing; and facilities running below full utilisation raised their output to help cover the Middle East losses. Each is a familiar short-term lever, and each carries a cost that the tonnage figures do not capture. Deferred maintenance is borrowed time, and plants pushed toward maximum utilisation have less headroom when something else goes wrong.
Mshelbila's framing was deliberately measured. Looking at prices, he said, "you think, oh, this was a total disaster," but the forum's view is that "it could have been much worse." That is a defensible reading of the volumes, and it points to a system that proved more flexible than the initial shock suggested. It also points to how much of the world's LNG flexibility now sits in North America, a shift with obvious strategic implications for producers in the Gulf and for buyers who had grown used to relying on them.
Several things remain unclear from the account. The report does not specify when the Strait of Hormuz closure began, how it was imposed or by whom, or whether it has been lifted. It gives no price data, no country-by-country breakdown of the replacement volumes, and no estimate of the cost of deferred maintenance or of the emissions and contractual consequences of rerouting supply. The 45 million and 39 million tonne figures are the secretary general's own estimates, offered in a conference speech rather than in a published dataset, and they have not been independently verified in the material available.
What the remarks do establish is that a chokepoint closure of this kind no longer translates directly into a proportional supply crisis. The buffer held. Whether that buffer can be drawn on twice, and at what price to the plants and exporters that provided it, is the question the market has not yet had to answer.
