TheChek News Flow

After last week saw 10 rounds of $100 million or more, investors followed up with another strong week that saw a half-dozen startups raise similarly. Also like last week, rounds were split across several verticals, including energy, healthcare and AI. Is the large growth round making a comeback? Or is this a two-week aberration?

1. Ascend Elements, $162M, batteries: It was only about five months ago that Ascend Elements made this list with a huge $460 million Series D led by Decarbonization Partners — a partnership between BlackRock and Temasek focusing on companies in the decarbonization space — Temasek and Qatar Investment Authority. Well, this week the Westborough, Massachusetts-based startup followed up that round with a $162 million investment from investors including Just Climate, Clearvision Ventures and Irongrey. Ascend is a manufacturer of sustainable battery materials for EVs. Founded in 2015, the company has now raised $1.7 billion, per Crunchbase.

2. (tied) Abridge, $150M, healthcare: AI is making a big impact on healthcare — and funding to healthcare startups. Abridge, which is building AI-powered clinical documentation tools, is the latest startup in that realm to raise big. The Pittsburgh-based startup raised a $150 million Series C led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Redpoint Ventures. The new round reportedly values the company at about $850 million. Founded in 2018, the company has raised nearly $208 million, per Crunchbase.

2. (tied) Antora Energy, $150M, energy: Speaking of Decarbonization Partners, the New York-based partnership led a $150 million Series B for Antora Energy this week. The Sunnyvale, California-based startup uses renewable electricity to heat blocks of carbon. That stored heat is then delivered to large industrial customers. The company also produces a thermal battery. Founded in 2017, Antora has raised $230 million, per the company.

4. Hornblower Group, $121M, leisure: Strategic Value Partners acquired a majority ownership stake in New York-based Hornblower, a travel experience company. The M&A agreement also gives Hornblower a fresh infusion of $121 million in financing from SVP-managed funds and Crestview Partners, which retains a minority stake in the company. Hornblower also announced a reshuffling of some of its units, including trying to sell its overnight cruising business. Clearly a lot is going on.

5. Recogni, $102M, artificial intelligence: Although most startup chipmakers have not seen much love from investors so far this year, Recogni seems to have bucked that trend. The San Jose, California-based firm, which is developing its AI inference chip for both the generative AI and automotive industries, raised a $102 million Series C co-led by Celesta Capital and GreatPoint Ventures. While the company has its roots in designing chips that help autonomous vehicles detect objects, it is now also exploring the AI market. The company’s accelerator chip uses live data in trained models for predictions — all while requiring less energy, the company says. U.S.-based semiconductor funding has slowed in recent quarters, despite the need for new chip designs, thanks to industries such as AI and automotive. Last year such startups saw only $1.2 billion in 66 deals — per Crunchbase data — after raking in more than $2 billion in 2022. This year has seen only a trickle of deals.

6. Eigen Labs, $100M, blockchain: Seattle-based Eigen Labs, the creator of EigenLayer for staking Ethereum, raised a $100 million round from a16z crypto. Founded in 2021, the company has raised $164 million, per Crunchbase.

7. Hadrian, $92M, manufacturing: Per a report, this round actually was completed in December but never really formally announced. Hawthorne, California-based Hadrian raised a $117 million Series B that included $25 million in debt. RTX Ventures, the venture arm of defense prime contractor RTX (formerly Raytheon) and a16z, participated in the round. The company builds “highly automated precision component factories” mainly to produce components for the space and defense industries. Founded in 2020, the company has raised nearly $217 million, per Crunchbase.

8. Frontier Medicines, $80M, pharmaceuticals: South San Francisco, California-based Frontier Medicines, a startup researching therapies against undruggable disease-causing targets, raised an $80 million Series C co-led by Deerfield Management Co. and Droia Ventures. Founded in 2018, Frontier says it has raised $235.5 million.

9. Clumio, $75M, data backup: As risk and regulation grow, so does the data backup industry. After reportedly increasing its ARR 4x last year, Clumio locked up $75 million in a Series D led by Sutter Hill Ventures. The Santa Clara, California-based startup provides data backup and recovery services for companies using the public cloud. Founded in 2017, Clumio has now raised $261 million, per the company.

10. Fabric, $60M, artificial intelligence: New York-based Fabric, which uses artificial intelligence to automate clinical and administrative healthcare work, raised a $60 million round led by General Catalyst. Founded in 2021, the company has raised $80 million, per Crunchbase.

Stellantis, the automaker that owns 14 brands including Chrysler, Jeep and Ram, and autonomous vehicle technology company Waymo are not only still working together, the companies are deepening the partnership, CEO Carlos Tavares told TechCrunch in a recent interview.

This “deepened” partnership will focus on commercial self-driving Ram delivery vans, a target that was first announced in 2020 and promptly faded from public view. Discussions on this “improved” deal have focused, in part, on a crux around driverless delivery: how does the package get from the vehicle to the customer?

“When you reach the destination, how do you take the parcel out of the van?” Tavares said in a wide-ranging interview. “This has been a point of discussion that doesn’t seem easy to solve and we are now upgrading our collaboration deal with them to take that into consideration.”

“At the same time, we understand their needs and there are a lot of things that we can do for them in terms of engineering,” he said, adding it is too soon to share details. “But I would say that the partnership with Waymo is getting deeper. And I think, more exciting.”

Tavares played coy on the important what, where and when details. But he did add that he expected to be able to share more “possibly by summer.”

A Waymo spokesperson confirmed that the company continues to look at ways to deepen its relationship with Stellantis, but didn’t share any other details or if progress had been made.

Tavares’ comments suggest the company has more than a passing interest in reviving a deal

that appeared destined to fizzle out as so many other autonomous vehicle-OEM partnerships have in the past two years.

Even if the two companies do cement a broader deal, there is still the very real challenge of executing it.

Waymo, which is owned by Google parent-company Alphabet, currently doesn’t operate a commercial delivery service using its self-driving vehicles. Last summer, it shuttered its self-driving trucks program, Waymo Via, to put all of its resources into scaling the robotaxi service.

In May 2023, Waymo and Uber agreed to a multi-year strategic partnership to allow Uber users to hail a driverless vehicle via the app in Phoenix. That deal did include a future plan to include delivery via Uber Eats, but as of today, it has not launched, according to a Waymo spokesperson.

The two companies have been partners since 2016 when a deal was struck to supply Waymo with thousands of custom Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid minivans that would become the first driverless vehicles to launch.

Under the deal, Fiat Chrysler — now known as Stellantis — would handle the manufacturing and provide Waymo with minivans that built in redundancies designed for autonomous driving.

Waymo never got close to the 62,000-minivan order it agreed to in 2018 as part of an expanded partnership with Fiat Chrysler. Hundreds, not thousands, of minivans were delivered to Waymo. But the minivan did become a critical part of its commercialization plan and over its lifespan the fleet provided tens of thousands of rides to the public, according to the company. (Waymo has never revealed detailed figures of its minivan fleet beyond that its total global fleet is somewhere around 700 vehicles.)

Waymo ended the Chrysler Pacifica program in May 2023. Today, its robotaxi service uses all-electric Jaguar I-Pace vehicles.

Meet the Former CFO Who Thinks He Can Fix Disney

Jay Rasulo wants to return from the sidelines. Disney says his perspective is stale

When Disney’s efforts to build a theme park in China became snarled in the late 2000s, Chief Executive Bob Iger sent his parks chief to Shanghai to figure out why government officials weren’t returning calls.

Jay Rasulo recalls meeting with a high-ranking Communist Party official on the trip who urged him not to give up. “Jay, keep knocking at the gate,” the official said. “Someday it will open.”

Nearly a decade after leaving Disney, Rasulo is back, once again knocking at the gates of power, this time as a nominee to join Disney’s board as part of activist investor Nelson Peltz’s proxy campaign against the company.

For more than a year, Peltz and his hedge fund, Trian Fund Management, have publicly criticized Disney’s current board and Iger’s management. Trian controls around 33 million Disney shares and is urging shareholders to vote Peltz and Rasulo onto the board at the company’s April 3 annual meeting.

The outcome of the vote could reshape how one of America’s most iconic entertainment companies is governed for years to come. The inclusion of Rasulo is a sign that Peltz thinks some shareholders will be persuaded to vote for a slate that includes an executive who grew intimately familiar with Disney over the course of his nearly 30-year tenure.

“When people call me about the company and what’s going on, I say, ‘Don’t ask me! It’s breaking my heart!’” Rasulo said in an interview. “When Nelson called me, I decided I couldn’t sit on the sidelines.”

Rasulo, once considered a potential successor to Iger, said he knows how to work with the veteran Disney CEO and that shareholders deserve “objective, passionate, owner-focused representatives” to hold the company’s management accountable. Peltz has said he wants Disney to target higher profit margins in the streaming business and have the board review the movie studio’s strategy.

Disney in recent weeks has argued that Peltz lacks the experience to help the company and told shareholders not to vote for him or Rasulo. A Disney spokesman said Rasulo left more than eight years ago and “in our view, his analog perspective is not relevant to the challenges of today’s digital media landscape.”

The company says the activist’s campaign is colored by personal animus. More than 25 million Disney shares in Peltz’s war chest—nearly 80% of the total—come from his friend and former Marvel Entertainment chairman Isaac “Ike” Perlmutter. Iger fired Perlmutter in March 2023 after the two men had quarreled for years over movie budgets and creative decisions.

‘Activator and a motivator’

Rasulo, born in Brooklyn, N.Y., and raised in Staten Island, cut his teeth as a finance executive in the hospitality industry. After earning an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago in 1984, he joined Marriott, helping launch new hotel lines.

He soon joined a wave of Marriott executives recruited by Disney to help manage the eruption of new business ideas prompted by the arrival of new CEO Michael Eisner.

Many of these executives ended up on Eisner’s Strategic Planning team, a division that advised the various Disney business units on how to best deploy capital and launch new products. Rasulo began working closely with the theme-park division, helping with pricing strategy and developing hotels at Disney’s resorts.

Rasulo later launched Club Disney, a short-lived chain of children’s play centers. He spent several years living in Paris managing Euro Disney, taking an immersive language course that helped him speak French fluently.

He returned to Burbank, Calif., to lead the Parks and Resorts division in the early 2000s and was credited with turning around Disneyland Resort’s finances and planning a $1.1 billion remodeling of its California Adventure theme park.

Bill Ernest, who worked under Rasulo in the early 2000s running Disney’s Asian theme parks, said he built up confidence in his subordinates.

“He asked a lot of probing questions to help you think about things,” Ernest said.

Experiences like Rasulo’s solo trip to China helped teach him the value of persistence, which he describes as one of his core business principles. Despite delays, Disney opened Shanghai Disney Resort in 2016, the first-ever project of its scale built by a Western entertainment company in mainland China.

“Jay was always a maniac about excellence,” said Regynald Washington, former vice president for food and beverage at Disney’s resorts, who described Rasulo as an “activator and a motivator.”

He said Rasulo was passionate about culture as well as business, recalling his taste for fine Italian and French food, Bordeaux wine and the music of B.B. King and Steely Dan. Rasulo has served on the board of the Los Angeles Philharmonic for nearly two decades.

He had critics inside Disney as well. Several former executives who worked alongside him said Rasulo could be harsh toward executives whose units were underperforming, and he had a bedside manner that sometimes came across as indelicate inside a company where a polite decorum usually prevails.

“I’m a very direct guy. Many people at Disney are not direct,” Rasulo said. “There are people who want to do their thing, and they don’t like it when someone calls them on it in a studio budget meeting, for example.”

Life after Disney

In 2010, Iger had Rasulo trade the parks chief job for Tom Staggs’ chief financial officer role, setting off a horse race to determine which of the two men would likely succeed the CEO. When Staggs was elevated to the position of chief operating officer—effectively Iger’s second-in-command—in 2015, the CEO asked Rasulo to stay on as finance chief.

Rasulo declined, resigning a few months later. “Was I disappointed? Of course I was. But that’s not a personal grudge,” Rasulo said. He added that he isn’t interested in a management role.

Inside the company, however, some senior executives have interpreted Rasulo’s partnership with Peltz and public comments he has made about Disney’s recent challenges as evidence that he is motivated by ill will toward Iger.

Since leaving Disney, Rasulo has served on boards of media executive Haim Saban’s private investment company and the radio and podcast company iHeartMedia. He was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a form of blood cancer, in 2019. The cancer is now in remission, he said.

Rasulo became friendly with Perlmutter after meeting him in 2010 and stayed in touch with him after leaving Disney. In January 2023, Rasulo was introduced to Peltz at a meeting at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Perlmutter, who had advocated for Rasulo to succeed Iger as CEO, urged Peltz to consider him as a board nominee.

The Disney spokesman said the company questions Rasulo’s ability to work constructively with its management team given his decision to leave the company in 2015 and his “close association” with Perlmutter.

In recent months, Disney has made a series of announcements that seem designed to counter Peltz’s narrative of a company in disarray, including a new sports-streaming partnership, forays into sports-betting and videogames and a surprise sequel to the animated feature “Moana.”

Its share price is up about 9% since its Feb. 7 earnings report, to $107.74, but Peltz says he isn’t impressed. Disney’s share price also rose a year ago after a flurry of strategic initiatives were announced during earnings, prompting Peltz to end an earlier proxy campaign.

“We dropped out after that earnings announcement because we trusted Disney would execute,” Peltz said in a statement. “We are not doing that again.”

Brazil rolls out dengue vaccines as cases rise sharply

Infections quadruple from last year after warnings that warming temperatures will increase cases

Brazil is scrambling to roll out new vaccines against dengue fever after the number of cases of the mosquito-borne disease more than quadrupled from last year’s rates.

The sharp increase, which has prompted several states to declare health emergencies and the Rio de Janeiro government to declare an epidemic, came after health officials warned of a rise in cases due to warmer weather from climate change and the El Niño weather pattern.

The country has reported more than 700,000 cases so far this year, up sharply from the 165,000 cases in the same period of 2023. More than 100 deaths have been reported from the virus, which is transmitted by mosquitoes and can cause high fever, muscle pain and internal bleeding.

The health ministry warned earlier this year that the number of dengue cases could reach a record 5mn in 2024, a more than threefold increase from the 1.65mn cases recorded last year, which resulted in 1,094 deaths. The previous record was 1.68mn cases in 2015.

The number of dengue cases typically peaks in April before tapering off, although health officials have said that rising global temperatures will allow the mosquitoes that carry the virus to thrive for longer. Last year Brazil reported its hottest year on record.

Argentina and Paraguay have also reported a surge in dengue cases. The Argentine ministry of health this week said 48,000 cases had been recorded between late July 2023 and mid-February, compared with just 1,000 in the same period a year earlier.

Nísia Trindade, Brazil’s health minister, said: “Now is the time for all of Brazil to unite against dengue. This is the time to intensify care and prevention . . . After 40 years of dealing with dengue epidemics, we now have an important scientific achievement: a vaccine.”

This month Brazil started distributing a vaccine produced by Japanese pharmaceutical group Takeda. Known as Qdenga, the vaccine has an efficacy rate of 80.2 per cent and consists of two shots with a three-month interval between them.

Because of supply bottlenecks, the vaccine is primarily being administered to children between the age of 10 and 14, who are the group most often hospitalised with the virus after elderly people. Regulators have not yet approved the vaccine for senior citizens.

Trindade said Brazil was the first country to incorporate a dengue vaccine into its free public health system. The São Paulo-based Butantan Institute has also developed a vaccine, but it has yet to be approved by regulators.

The disease is transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which thrives in pools of stagnant water.

“The poorest regions suffer the most because of the housing conditions and urban structure that support the spread of mosquitoes. Mortality is higher among the poorest,” said Alberto Chebabo, president of the Brazilian Society of Infectious Diseases.

“We’re now in the rainy and hot season, so we can’t reverse the proliferation of the mosquito. The focus now is on care to reduce mortality.”

The World Health Organization has described dengue fever as a “substantial public health challenge”, noting a “10-fold surge in reported cases worldwide increasing from 500,000 to 5.2mn” between 2000 and 2019.

Goldman insider-trading conviction shows UK watchdog sharpening its teeth

Financial Conduct Authority says case should be ‘wake-up call’ to City of London

Mohammed Zina held his head in his hands in the dock at London’s Southwark Crown Court after the jury foreperson repeated “guilty” nine times in answer to each of the charges against him.

The sharply dressed 35-year-old ex-Goldman Sachs analyst was convicted this month of insider dealing and fraud after a trial lasting nearly three months. The following day, he started his 22-month sentence at HMP Wandsworth, a men’s prison dating from Victorian times in London.

“I cannot help but feel pity for you, because you have thrown away what was undoubtedly a promising career in banking,” Judge Tony Baumgartner said as he sentenced Zina on February 16. “Your reputation now is lost, and it is likely you will never be trusted to work in a position of such responsibility again.”

The Zina case — known as Operation Kempston by the FCA — is the first insider dealing conviction the UK Financial Conduct Authority has secured since 2019. The agency’s new enforcement heads are hoping it will send a message to the City of London that it is serious about the offence, according to Therese Chambers, joint executive director of enforcement and market oversight at the FCA.

“There are many successful professionals across the City who are also in positions of trust and this outcome should be a wake-up call to them that trust is there for a reason, it is not there to be abused,” Chambers said in an interview with the Financial Times on Thursday, her first since taking up the role in April.

Zina’s solicitor declined to comment on his conviction. A spokesperson for Goldman said the bank had “zero tolerance for this conduct”.

After a fallow period for enforcement in the UK during the Covid-19 pandemic, the FCA is showing signs that it is looking to get back on the front foot. The watchdog arrested three London-based individuals on suspicion of insider dealing this month and is in the midst of prosecuting a number of others for the offence.

The FCA currently has 17 insider dealing investigations open, compared with 22 in 2022 and 14 in 2021, according to data provided by the agency.

The regulator has had a mixed record on pursuing insider trading.

In the past decade, it has secured the convictions of employees from blue-chip firms including UBS and BlackRock Investment Management. The agency also prosecuted the UK’s biggest-ever insider trading ring — Operation Tabernula — charging nine men, from day traders to a former corporate broker at Deutsche Bank.

Yet, prosecutions have been lacking in recent years and cases it has pursued have not always gone smoothly. Only two of the five men tried in Tabernula were convicted — although another three previously pleaded guilty and one was convicted in absentia — and even the Zina case lost a defendant partway through the proceedings. The watchdog has also faced questions over the credibility of some of its witnesses.

Originally charged alongside his brother, Suhail Zina, a former Clifford Chance lawyer, was acquitted on all nine counts before the trial ended, after the FCA withdrew the fraud counts against him and the judge ruled that there was no case for him to answer on insider trading.

Mohammed Zina had used Suhail’s name, as well as their sister’s, to open trading accounts as a way of disguising his activity from Goldman. He took out loans with Tesco Bank, applying for them on the basis he wanted to finance home improvements, and used the funds in part to place 46 illegal trades through the accounts in his brother’s and sister’s names.

“When this case was opened [ . . .] the narrative upon which you were addressed [was that] this was a joint enterprise between two siblings to purchase property and cars,” said Brendan Kelly KC, defence counsel for Mohammed Zina, in his closing speech. “Well, we now know where one of the siblings sits: he’s not guilty.”

Meanwhile, Fergal O’Driscoll, head of Emea conflicts and reputational risk at Goldman and a prosecution witness, was interviewed by police for possible contempt of court after speaking to another Goldman witness during the trial. A witness for Tesco who was called to testify about the loan applications was described by the FCA’s own lead prosecutor Peter Carter KC as “useless”.

“As with every case, I think we’ll review it and we’ll see what learning comes out of it,” Steve Smart, Chambers’ fellow head of FCA enforcement, said in the same FT interview.

O’Driscoll was found not to be in contempt. Goldman declined to comment on the witness issues.

For Mohammed Zina, the end came in December 2017. In an interview with FCA investigators at a London police station following his arrest, Zina said he had beaten the odds to get a job at Goldman after his dream to become a professional cricketer failed to pan out.

He picked up an investment banking brochure that was lying around in the bedroom he shared with his more academic brother, Suhail, and Goldman was the first name he saw. While at Durham University, he secured a placement year at the bank in its operations division, working daily with agencies like the FCA, he said.

In 2016, two years after he joined the bank full time, Zina was moved into the conflicts resolution group, where he was privy to the inside information that prosecutors accused him of using to trade.

Even after he started at Goldman full time, he worked at Sainsbury’s supermarket at the weekends for a while because “he missed working with ordinary people”, a school friend said in a witness statement.

During the trial, the jury heard how Zina had made about £140,000 in profits from trading on stocks including semiconductor designer Arm and pub company Punch Taverns.

His biggest win was about £55,000 in profit on trades in US food company Snyder’s-Lance.

In his interview, Zina told investigators that his passion for trading had kept him afloat while he was caring for his mother who had cancer and later died.

“On one level this is a tragic story,” said Chambers. “A young man from an ordinary background who has worked very hard to build a prestigious career that he’s thrown away for what he thought was going to be a risk-free profit”.

She added: “The risk equation he obviously got fundamentally wrong.”

European football needs innovation and drama, says Real Madrid and FC Barcelona investor

Alan Waxman, head of US investment group Sixth Street, foresees ‘more structural change’ in sport to excite fans and attract new audiences

European football needs more matches with drama and competitive tension to keep fans interested and attract new audiences to the sport, according to the chief of the US investment group that has backed top Spanish clubs Real Madrid and FC Barcelona.

Alan Waxman, a former Goldman Sachs partner and co-founder of Sixth Street, which manages more than $75bn in assets, said the sport needed to innovate in order to appeal to a wider audience.

“There are more and more forms of entertainment that people, especially younger demographics, can consume,” he told the Financial Times. “If you don’t create more drama . . . you can start to lose the core and once that starts, it’s hard to get people back in. That’s why the best businesses innovate before that happens.”

The San Francisco-based investment group executed deals in 2022 with La Liga giants Barça and Real Madrid. The two clubs are backers of a plan to create a new European Super League to replace the Uefa Champions League, Europe’s most prestigious club competition.

Waxman, who declined to comment on the ESL, expects to see “more structural change in European football” in the search for more games of consequence that can excite fans.

Next season Uefa is overhauling the Champions League format, with the aim of reducing the number of inconsequential matches.

Waxman warned that unless football clubs with global brands continued to invest, they were at risk of losing their lustre. Clubs that may have had global recognition historically could become “melting ice cubes because they don’t do the right things from a business and fan perspective and they don’t invest in the experience”, he said.

The opportunity for clubs is to tap into new technology that allows fans to follow them from wherever they are in the world, Waxman said, in a continued diversification of revenues in addition to ticket sales and traditional television deals.

Waxman, who co-founded Sixth Street in 2009, also highlighted the urgent need to upgrade stadiums and other infrastructure to give fans a “centre of gathering”. Real Madrid and Barça are investing heavily in their stadiums.

Sixth Street took a majority stake in a company that owns 25 per cent of Barça’s La Liga television rights for 25 years, allowing the member-owned club to generate capital gains and pay down debt. Separately, Sixth Street and Legends, the live events business in which it has a majority stake, struck a deal with Real Madrid, which received €360mn to invest across the business.

The investments are part of a surge of private capital into the world’s most popular sport.

Private equity firm CVC Capital Partners has financed the Spanish and French football leagues, while US investors have bought famous clubs, including Italy’s AC Milan and Premier League side Chelsea.

As well as backing two of the most famous clubs in sport, Sixth Street last year committed $125mn to buy a new National Women’s Soccer League club, now known as Bay FC. 

“The biggest growth opportunity in sports over the next 10 years will be global women’s football,” Waxman said. “You can already see that happening, but that’s just getting started.”

US football legends Brandi Chastain, Aly Wagner, Danielle Slaton and Leslie Osborne co-founded Bay FC in partnership with Sixth Street. The NWSL side has made a series of international signings ahead of its first season, which starts in March, including Nigerian international Asisat Oshoala, Zambian forward Racheal Kundananji from Spanish side Madrid CFF and Scottish defender Jen Beattie from Arsenal.

Gulf state’s liquefied natural gas production capacity to rise nearly 85% before end of decade

Qatar plans to further increase its liquefied natural gas (LNG) production capacity following the discovery of vast new gas reserves, as it looks to tap surging demand from China and other Asian nations.

The move, which comes on top of planned increases to output announced in recent years, will mean that its overall production capacity will rise almost 85 per cent from current levels before the end of the decade, according to an announcement on Sunday.

The plans mark a bet by the Gulf state that strong demand for the fuel will continue, with Asian economies switching from coal as part of efforts to cut carbon dioxide emissions. The move also comes as the US reviews its own LNG export plans to consider the impact on the country’s energy security and carbon footprint.

The plans will “take Qatar’s gas industry to new horizons”, said Saad Sherida Al-Kaabi, Qatar’s energy minister. 

Qatar is already one of the world’s largest suppliers of LNG — gas cooled into liquid form so that it can be piped on to ships for export — competing with Australia and the US for the top spot. 

It currently has capacity to produce about 77mn tonnes per annum (mtpa), but has announced plans in recent years to expand that to 126 mtpa by 2027. 

State-owned QatarEnergy said it would add a further 16 mtpa before the end of the decade, taking total capacity to 142 mtpa, an almost 85 per cent increase on today’s levels. 

It comes as Qatar raised the size of its gas reserves by about 14 per cent to 2 quadrillion cubic feet, after new discoveries at its vast North Field gasfield, and added that significant quantities were extractable on its west side.

“These are very important results of great dimensions,” said Kaabi, who is also chief executive of Doha-based QatarEnergy. 

Demand for LNG climbed in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 as Europe tried to replace lost Russian pipeline volumes. 

While Europe and the UK are trying to cut their reliance on natural gas to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, others are turning to the fuel as a lower carbon alternative to coal. 

In a report this month, oil and gas supermajor Shell forecast global demand for LNG would climb by more than 50 per cent to reach 625mn to 685mn tonnes by 2040, and would continue to grow during that decade, as China and developing Asian nations switched from coal to gas. 

“As we move into the early 2030s, there’s going be huge demand for gas from Asia, and I think QatarEnergy is squarely focused on that,” said Tom Marzec-Manser, head of gas analytics at commodity pricing and data company ICIS.

Qatar has secured two huge gas supply deals with China over the past 15 months. Last June, it agreed to sell 4mn tonnes a year of LNG to China National Petroleum Corporation for 27 years, following a similar deal with China’s Sinopec in November 2022. 

Qatar’s expansion plans come as the US pauses approvals for new LNG terminals along its coastline while it takes a “hard look at the effects of LNG exports on energy costs, America’s energy security and our environment”, President Biden said in January.