Qatar Petroleum (QP), the country’s energy giant, has said it will push ahead with strategies of production expansion and foreign asset acquisition to be on par with oil majors despite the ongoing illegal siege of Qatar, reported Al Jazeera.

Although Qatar is one of OPEC’s smallest oil producers, it is one of the globe’s most influential players in the LNG market due to its annual production of 77 million tonnes.

“We’re in Mexico, we’re in Brazil, we’re contemplating investing in the US in many areas, in shale gas, in conventional oil. We’re looking at many things,” said QP’s Chief Executive Saad Sherida Al Kaabi.

“We’re looking very critically at the United States because we’ve a position there. We’ve the Golden Pass that we’re investing in,” he said.

QP is the majority owner of Golden Pass LNG terminal in Texas, with ExxonMobil Corp and ConocoPhillips holding smaller stakes.

Depending on the project’s cost and feasibility, Al Kaabi said he was expecting to take a final investment decision on expanding the Golden Pass LNG by the end of the year.

“I’m not in the business of infrastructure. I’m not going to have a liquefaction plant only. It has to be something that’ll be linked with an upstream business that we would buy in the US so we need to be naturally hedged,” he said.

To maintain its dominance in the US and Australia, QP is cutting costs at home and seeking to expand overseas through joint ventures with international companies.

“We’ll always go with one of our international partners that we’ve business with here in Qatar. Some of our partners want to divest, some of our partners want to acquire something together,” he said.

Al Kaabi has been widely credited with keeping Qatar’s gas flowing out of the country despite the ongoing illegal siege of Qatar. 

The US-educated engineer, who rose through the ranks to become QP’s CEO in 2014, said he had a contingency plan to maintain energy flows that account for 60% of Qatar’s state revenues.

“It was the best stress test we can have for our system to show whether we’re really up for a challenge,” Al Kaabi told Reuters.

“When the blockade happened, we had a business continuity plan in every company,” he said.

For Qatar, broadening its investments outside the Middle East would cement its position as the world’s largest LNG supplier and help it to weather the boycott.