London, March 21, 2026, 15:03 GMT
London-listed Shell shares ended Friday down 0.78% at 3,434 pence after the company said repairs to a damaged train at its Pearl plant in Qatar would take about a year. Shell said the first train at the plant was not damaged and its 30% interest in QatarEnergy LNG N(4), equal to 2.4 million tonnes a year of equity production, was unaffected. 1
That matters because the stock is now caught between two hard pulls. Shell has a direct operational hit in Qatar, but Brent crude settled Friday at $112.19 a barrel, its highest since July 2022, and Shell’s shares are still not far below the 52-week high of 3,486 pence touched on March 17. 2
The Pearl site turns natural gas into liquid fuels such as diesel. Shell said production stopped on Thursday after the Ras Laffan attack, and the facility can process up to 1.6 billion cubic feet of gas a day into 140,000 barrels a day of gas-to-liquids, or GTL, products. 3
The damage sits inside a broader shock to Qatar’s export system. QatarEnergy CEO Saad al-Kaabi said the Iranian strikes knocked out 17% of the country’s liquefied natural gas export capacity, or 12.8 million tonnes per year, for three to five years and forced the company to declare force majeure on some long-term contracts — a legal step used to suspend deliveries after events beyond a supplier’s control. “Everybody should stay away from oil and gas facilities,” Kaabi said. 4
Oil analysts are still focused on tighter supply. Again Capital partner John Kilduff called the backdrop “the worst-case scenario,” Saxo Bank’s Ole Hansen said a quick reversal in energy prices was unlikely because “damage has been done to production,” and UBS analyst Giovanni Staunovo said the “path of least resistance” for crude remained higher while Hormuz flows stayed restricted. 2
Peers face similar strain. ExxonMobil holds stakes in the damaged Qatari LNG trains, while TotalEnergies has said 15% of its production is offline in the region; calculations based on company annual reports show Shell’s own Middle East oil and gas output, excluding Qatar, was about 307,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day in 2025, or 11% of group output. 5
Friday’s drop also came in a weak London market. The FTSE 100 fell 1.4% and British energy shares lost 1.7%, even though the sector remains around record highs, as traders swung from betting on rate cuts to pricing in possible Bank of England hikes after the latest oil shock. 6
Shell still has a buffer. In February it kept its $3.5 billion quarterly buyback after fourth-quarter profit missed forecasts, and LSEG data show the company has repurchased about $60 billion of stock in the last four years, including $14 billion in 2025. Shell also disclosed another March 20 tranche of share purchases for cancellation under that programme. 7
But this trade can turn fast. Washington said on Friday it had lent 45.2 million barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to oil firms including Shell Trading as part of a wider emergency release, while QatarEnergy said its production cannot fully resume until hostilities stop and then only after months of recovery. That leaves Shell facing two-way risk: weaker oil if government action cools prices, or longer outages if the conflict spreads. 8
That tension is likely to dominate the next readout from the sector. At CERAWeek in Houston next week, executives are set to focus on energy security and supply shocks; Geoffrey Pyatt, now at McLarty Associates, called the mix of Gulf turmoil, Venezuela and Russia “an extraordinary moment” for the geopolitics around energy. 9
