page_title: Ras Laffan Industrial City
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Ras Laffan Industrial City / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Ras Laffan satellite imagery taken in 2006 by NASA.
context_page_description: Ras Laffan Industrial City is an industrial hub located 80 kilometres north of Doha, Qatar. It is administrated by Qatar Petroleum.
  Ras Laffan Industrial City is the Qatar's main site for production of liquefied natural gas and gas-to-liquid. It hosts among others ORYX GTL and Pearl GTL plants, Qatargas and RasGas LNG plants, the Dolphin gas processing plant, the Laffan Refinery, and Ras Laffan A, B, and C integrated water and power plants. With an enclosed water area of approximately 4,500 hectares Ras Laffan Port is the largest artificial harbour in the world and contains the world's largest LNG export facility.
context_section_description: The earliest-known English text to describe Ras Laffan was in the 1890 book The Persian Gulf Pilot,  published by the Britain Hydrographic Dept. It recounts only geographic features, inferring that the area was not settled at the time. In an early 1904 transcript of the Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, Oman and Central Arabia by John G. Lorimer, it is mentioned that a pearling bank known as Umm Al Shebh is found off the coast of Ras Laffan, although Lorimer provides no description of Ras Laffan itself.
  As an industrial city, Ras Laffan was commissioned in 1996. The purpose of its founding was to host petrochemical facilities for the natural gas obtained North Field. The North Field, found in 1971, is the world's biggest natural gas field, occupying an offshore area of roughly 6,000 square km; more than half the size of the State of Qatar. North Field contains over 900 trillion tcsf of recoverable gas.
  Ras Laffan's commission in 1996 marks the completion date for the city's first liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant to convert the natural gas obtained from North Field into LNG. At first, it was estimated that only 106 square km would be needed for industrial operations. However, in 2004, this figure was more than drastically increased, to 296 square km.
  In March 2011, the city signed a memorandum of understanding with the Port of Rotterdam on the occasion of an official visit by Queen Beatrix to Qatar.
  It was announced in May 2019 by Qatargas that the company's Ras Laffan terminal received its 10,00th non-LNG related shipment.
caption: Satellite imagery of Ras Laffan in 2006
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