Pakistan faces winter natural gas shortages unless LNG flows through the Strait of Hormuz recover, Masood Nabi, chief executive officer of state-owned Pakistan LNG Limited (PLL), warned on Thursday.

Speaking at the WPC Energy Congress in Riyadh, Nabi said the coming winter "will be challenging" for Pakistan, Upstream reports. His remarks put a hard constraint on the country's fuel planning with months to go before peak seasonal demand.

Where is the bottleneck?

Nabi drew a sharp line between two problems. Pakistan's core difficulty is not the availability of gas, he said. It is the heavily disrupted transit of Qatari and Emirati LNG cargoes through the Strait of Hormuz.

That distinction matters for practitioners. A supply problem would push Pakistan to hunt for substitute volumes — US or Atlantic-basin cargoes, for example. A transit problem leaves the molecules in place but raises the cost and reliability of getting them to a Pakistani terminal, since Qatari and UAE shipments must clear the strait.

The takeaway: Pakistan's winter gap is a logistics risk, not a sourcing gap — at least on the seller side.

What does this mean for the winter balance?

Pakistan imports LNG to feed power generation, industry and domestic distribution networks that already ration gas in winter. If Hormuz transit remains severely disrupted, PLL faces a narrower window to land cargoes before demand peaks.

The consequences compound quickly:

• Deferred or rerouted cargoes arrive late into a system with little storage buffer.
• Utility and industrial users absorb curtailments first, as in past winter squeeze years.
• Spot buying under time pressure tends to cost more than term arrangements, straining PLL's balance sheet.

Nabi did not set out cargo counts or volume forecasts in the reported remarks, so the size of the shortfall remains undefined. What he did make clear is the direction: strained transit plus winter demand equals a difficult season.

The takeaway: unless Hormuz flows normalize before the cold months, Pakistan enters winter with a structural import gap it cannot quickly close.

Why Hormuz matters here

For LNG buyers east of the strait, Hormuz is the chokepoint that turns Gulf supply into deliverable supply. Qatar is among the world's largest LNG exporters, and the UAE also ships cargoes through the waterway. Disruption there does not just delay one cargo — it gums up scheduling across a buyer's entire winter program.

Pakistan's position is tighter than larger importers'. Its import infrastructure and contracting position leave less room to substitute long-haul Atlantic volumes at short notice.

The takeaway: the same chokepoint that moves world LNG prices moves Pakistan's winter heating supply directly.

What to watch

Watch the strait. A recovery in Hormuz LNG transit in the coming weeks determines whether PLL enters winter with a workable cargo schedule or a rationing scenario. Watch also for any PLL statement on additional term or spot tenders as a hedge — a signal that the importer itself doubts the transit picture will improve in time.