Concentrating on of Power Services Turned Iran Warfare into Worst‑Case State of affairs for Gulf States

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The U.S.-Israeli navy marketing campaign towards Iran took a harmful activate March 18, 2026, with tit-for-tat strikes on vital power infrastructure that quantity to essentially the most critical regional escalation for the reason that battle started.

First, an Israeli drone strike focused amenities at Iran’s Asaluyeh complicated, damaging 4 vegetation that deal with gasoline from the offshore South Pars discipline, which straddles the maritime boundary between Iran and Qatar.

Tehran vowed to retaliate by hitting 5 key power targets in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. Hours later, Iranian missiles brought about “in depth injury” to Ras Laffan, the guts of Qatar’s power sector. Qatar’s state-owned petroleum firm stated further assaults on March 19 had focused liquefied pure gasoline amenities.

Separate suspected Iranian aerial assaults additionally brought about injury to grease refineries in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and led to the closure of gasoline amenities within the United Arab Emirates.

A lot consideration has been targeted on the seemingly unanticipated penalties of the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran and the de facto closure of the Strait of Hormuz to worldwide delivery. However as a scholar of the Gulf, I imagine that the concentrating on of power amenities is near a worst-case final result for regional states. Export revenues from oil and, in Qatar’s case, pure gasoline have remodeled the Gulf states into regional powers with international attain over the previous three a long time, and that’s now in danger.

Power turns into a battlefield

The offshore gasoline discipline that lies on each side of the maritime boundary between Qatar and Iran is the world’s largest reserve of so-called nonassociated gasoline. Which means that the gasoline isn’t related to the manufacturing of crude oil and is unaffected by selections to lift or decrease output in response to, for instance, OPEC quotas.

The sector, generally known as the North Area on the Qatari facet and South Pars on the Iranian facet, was found in 1971. Improvement of its large assets started in earnest within the Eighties. Largely due to the sector, Iran and Qatar have the second- and third-largest confirmed gasoline reserves on the planet, respectively.

Whereas Israel attacked gasoline amenities in southern Iran on the second day of the 12-day battle in June 2025, oil and gasoline infrastructure was largely spared throughout that earlier battle. The opening two weeks of the present combating, nevertheless, have seen a major loosening of the restraints on concentrating on vital infrastructure.

On March 8, Israel struck oil storage amenities in Tehran, beginning giant fires and blanketing the capital in plumes of smoke and poisonous, so-called black rain. For his or her half, Iranian officers signaled that power amenities have been on the desk as swarms of its drones focused the Shaybah oil discipline in Saudi Arabia, the Shah gasoline discipline southwest of Abu Dhabi and oil amenities in Fujairah.

One of many seven emirates of the United Arab Emirates together with Abu Dhabi, Fujairah is strategically positioned on the Gulf of Oman, exterior the Strait of Hormuz, with direct entry to the Indian Ocean. Because of this, it has grown into an necessary oil-loading and ship fuel-supplying hub and is the terminus for the Abu Dhabi crude oil pipeline.

Opened in 2012, that pipeline has a capability of 1.5 million barrels per day, masking greater than half of the UAE’s oil exports. Its repeated concentrating on in the course of the battle signifies Iranian intent to disrupt one of many two pipelines that bypass Hormuz. To date, the opposite pipeline, the East-West pipeline from the japanese Saudi oil fields to the Pink Sea port of Yanbu, has not been focused.

However that might shortly change, as early on March 19 Saudi authorities reported {that a} drone had struck a refinery at Yanbu, whereas a ballistic missile that focused the port had been intercepted.

Cascading dangers of additional power assaults

On no less than 4 events over the previous decade, most just lately in 2022, Houthi forces in Yemen – who’re allied with Iran– struck targets across the East-West pipeline.

And in 2024 and 2025, in defiance of U.S. and Israeli coverage within the area, the Houthis led a marketing campaign towards delivery within the Pink Sea.

Up to now, the Houthis have kept away from becoming a member of the most recent battle, however they’ve threatened to take action. Any such actions would trigger monumental further disruption to grease markets.

Nevertheless, the assault on Ras Laffan in Qatar and the broader threats to different power infrastructure within the Gulf have the potential on their very own to be catastrophic for plenty of causes.

Developed within the Nineteen Nineties, the economic metropolis of Ras Laffan is essentially the most vital cog in Qatar’s financial and power panorama and the epicenter of the most important facility for the manufacturing and export of LNG on the planet. Fourteen large LNG “trains” course of the gasoline from the North Area, which is then transported by vessels from the accompanying port to locations worldwide.

Ras Laffan additionally homes gas-to-liquids amenities – these convert pure gasoline into liquid petroleum merchandise – together with a refinery and water and energy vegetation that produce desalinated water and generate electrical energy. Ras Laffan is sort of merely the engine that has powered Qatar’s meteoric progress and rise as a world energy dealer.

Early studies recommend that the world’s largest gas-to-liquids plant, Pearl GTL, which is operated by Shell, was broken in the course of the first assault on Ras Laffan, and that the second assault broken 17% of Qatar’s LNG capability, with repairs projected to take three to 5 years. A 3-phased growth to the LNG amenities, which might add an additional six LNG trains by 2027, can be prone to be delayed.

The burning Gulf state dilemma

What is evident is that Iranian officers view the Israeli — or American — concentrating on of amenities of their territorial waters within the South Pars discipline as enough to justify hitting amenities on the Qatari facet. That’s though Qatar forcefully condemned the Israeli strike on Asaluyeh as a harmful escalation, for causes which have develop into all too actual.

There lies the nub of the dilemma for Qatar and the 5 different Gulf states going through the brunt of the backlash from a battle they tried to avert by means of diplomacy.

On my visits to the area in fall 2025, it grew to become clear that many officers within the Gulf considered the ceasefire that ended the 12-day battle as, at greatest, a brief cessation of hostilities and feared that the following spherical of combating could be way more damaging, for Iran and for the area.

This has now come to cross. An embattled authorities in Tehran that sees itself in an existential battle for survival has unfold the price of battle as far and as huge as it will possibly.