Name: Iran says its facilities on the world’s largest natural gas field attacked | BBC News
Uploaded: 2026-03-18T23:01:12.000Z
Duration: 5 min 30 s
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We're going to focus in the next few minutes on a story that's been breaking and that is the attack on the South Pas gas field in Iran.

This news coming to us from a news agency linked to the Revolutionary Guard Corps in Iran.

It's reported the fire teams were dispatched to contain that blaze.

South Pas is a portion of the world's largest natural gas field.

The Qatari Foreign Ministry condemned the attack as dangerous and irresponsible.

What affects one side of the field does have the potential to affect another.

It's one big basin and the two countries do liaise on how they manage it.

And in response, Iran's issued evacuation orders for five energy facilities in the Gulf, in Saudi Arabia, the UAE and in Qatar.

And as a result, they've just seen on your screens, oil prices Suddenly climbing again, topping $108 a barrel in early trading.

I've just been watching, in fact, as the IND turned red, the benchmark for UK gas price also rising by nearly 6%.

Let's bring in our North America business correspondent, Samira Hussein.

And the reason for that, not least the retaliation that Iran is promising, Samira, is because this gas field, it is one.

And if there's a fire at one side, as I say, it potentially has an impact on the other side of the gas field.

So the enormity of this kind of an attack, because it has such a cascading impact on a large swath of Iran's oil and gas reserves, it really could have quite a huge impact in terms of how much oil is getting out onto is getting out of Iran.

Now, you couple that with already these statements by the international maritime organizations that is saying it is just far too dangerous to have any kind of military escort for these ships through the Strait of Hormuz.

You're seeing an intense amount of pressure on oil prices, which is why you're seeing it go up to more than $108 a barrel.

And depending on whether we see any kind of retaliation from Iran, we can probably see those prices going up even higher.

Germany's Friedrich Matt has been speaking in the last hour, Samira, saying that it's to everyone's detriment, this war, and

that is reflected by the strike, because Iranian gas, which has been flowing to Iraq, has suddenly been suspended.

So Iraq now suffering from presumably a gas shortage.

As a result of this, everybody is affected in the energy markets by what is going on in that Gulf region.

And if you look at the impact, especially when you're looking at the Asia, European sort of trajectory in terms of getting things out of that Strait of Hormuz, you're seeing quite an intense amount of, of pressure.

Now, we know that some Iranian oil is getting out to other countries, that other countries have made individual agreements, Iran to, for their, for their ships.

So, for example, India has been able to get some stuff out of the Strait of Hormuz, but

And so it might be alleviating a little bit of pressure for some countries.

It's not the kind of blanket movement of goods that we saw before this war.

And of course, the concern is that these energy prices, if they continue to climb like this, it could push the entire, entire world into a recession.

A global recession is very much possible.

Yeah, A lot of pressure coming from Washington, particularly on those NATO countries.

I wonder if you could respond to this, Samir.

We've just had this from Johnny Beale, our defense correspondent.

He says John Healey, the Defense secretary here, has had important discussions today with defense ministers from France, Germany, Italy and Poland on the Strait of Hormuz.

He said that they'd discussed working with allies to reinforce regional security and protect British interests, but

he's not giving any response to whether the allies would send shipping to the Gulf.

And according to President Macron, that's only going to happen when tensions are eased in that area.

It's not going to send ships to the Gulf if there's still a hot war in place?

And I think that we've already heard from many of European countries saying exactly that, that they're not going to be going in to protect any vessels going through the Gulf because it's just, it's frankly too dangerous.

And we're seeing that international organizations are also saying that it's just frankly too dangerous.

So what those discussions are, is, you know, it's interesting to know that they're having these discussions regionally amongst allies, but

really the conversations need to be had with Iran in this case.

I mean, there is a case to be made, as we've seen with other countries like India who have made individual agreements with Iran to say, hey, look, don't target this particular ship.

It's not going anywhere, anywhere else but to India.

And you could presumably see a situation like that happening where you're seeing more and more individual countries that are creating these one on one, that are opening one on one discussion channels with Iran in order to protect their own best interests.