MIDDLE EAST NEWS

By the second day, the press corps was in open revolt. Promises of one-to-one meetings with ministers had been quietly swept aside, and even the British public relations boys were admitting to us in private that the trip was a bust.

(At the previous night’s reception, I had casually asked a British PR how the day had gone from his perspective. He leaned in, stared fixedly into my eyes like a hunted animal, and confessed that it had been the worst day of his career.)

Disillusioned, we impassively accepted our fate: a morning at a liquefied natural gas (LNG) facility in Ras Laffan, some forty minutes’ drive from Doha.

LNG is where you compress gas into a liquid, whack it on a ship and send it off to Asia, or increasingly, the US. It's good if you don't want to build pipelines. It's the future, some say.

The cracks started to show during the introductory video presentation, which told the story of Qatar’s natural gas industry and the Ras Laffan plant, closing with the phrase “It’s Ras Laffantastic!” This had a few of us desperately biting our knuckles. Herded back on the buses for the grand tour, the stout and somewhat camp tour guide made some opening remarks in English, causing the Arab press to again go apeshit. A few chuckles were suppressed from the Westerners at the back of the bus. The driver then fired the engine, which shook gamely before shuddering to a complete halt. This was too much; the international media dissolved into fits of laughter.

Wiping tears from our eyes, we watched on as the poor guide attempted to give his speech in both English and Arabic, only for the Arab press to shout him down every time he dared speak infidel, which was every thirty seconds. He pleaded that he was “just trying to please everybody,” but this didn’t cut it – eventually, the buses stopped and the Westerners were evacuated to the bus behind. Linguistic segregation assured, the tour continued.

I’m being a little disingenuous in running down the experience of touring the LNG facility. I write about the more rarefied financial aspects of the energy industry, so it’s refreshing for me to see the nuts and bolts every once and a while (although this was clearly not true for most of my colleagues.) Big gas flares, racks of computers keeping tabs on flows and pressure - it's all good.

Best of all was the anti-dehydration signs in the men's room, which explained what the optimum shade of urine is, using a colour-coded system (the lighter the better.) I wanted to take a picture, but as my phone is not "explosion-proof", I had to turn it off during my visit.

Also there were loads of cool LNG tankers from all over the world. My principal regret in life is that I am not a mariner - I tried to join the Merchant Navy two years ago, but I was too old and they wouldn’t have me - so I was perfectly happy to hang out by the docks for a while.



Tom looks at a tanker, utterly disillusioned.