Patricia Cohen

It's a very expensive facility, and it takes a long time to build.

And what happens is that you take gas and you freeze it to 240 or 260 degrees below zero, and then you compress it.

And so it takes up 600 times less space than gas because you turn it into a liquid.

And so...

That's complicated.

And then you have to transport it in the same specialized container so that you can bring it somewhere else.

Right.

I mean, oil is a lot easier to store and transport.

And that's what makes this particularly worrisome because it's hard to store and transport LNG.

And now you've just taken capacity offline.

So Qatar is the world's largest producer of LNG.

It supplies about 20 percent of the world's liquefied natural gas.

It's one of the biggest exporters.

So what happened at the beginning of the war, because transit was halted,

Basically, it suspended its production because it just had no place to put it.

The storage facilities are only so big.

So that's obviously a temporary problem.

But what happened last week was that because of Iran's attack, nearly 20 percent of Qatar's ability to produce LNG was destroyed.

And that will take several years to fix, maybe as many as five.

Exactly.