Faisal Al Suwaidi has become a victim of his own success in creating a worldwide market for liquid natural gas

RED flames shimmer behind a thick shroud of smoke at the Ras Laffan gas plant in Qatar. Methane from the bottom of the Persian Gulf is part-combusted and filtered in a spaghetti-like tangle of steel pipes. Further along, the gas is cooled in bulbous storage tanks to minus 160°C, turning it into liquid and reducing it to one-six-hundredth of its original volume, ready to be sent across the oceans aboard a new generation of supercarriers. Local officials boast that the plant will be the largest structure made by man in centuries when it is finished next year. Already it produces a quarter of the world’s liquefied natural gas (LNG).

Ras Laffan is a singular industrial success, but that was no foregone conclusion. It would not have been built without one man taking a gamble. Faisal Al Suwaidi, the boss of Qatargas, wagered a decade ago that a massive boost in production would create a market large enough for his country’s main asset, the world’s biggest known gasfield. When it was discovered in 1971, Qataris were dismayed. Mr Suwaidi, who got his first job in the petroleum industry the following year, remembers there being a lingering disappointment that gas, not oil, had been found in the vast offshore North Field. Nobody traded gas then. Later a regional market developed in eastern Asia, with Japan and South Korea buying LNG from gas-rich Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei, but gas remained oil’s underachieving younger sibling, lacking a global market. …