Oct. 8 (Bloomberg) -- Qatar, the world's biggest producer of liquefied natural gas, may force the decoupling of gas prices from crude oil, an industry analyst said.

``The gas market will become detached from oil when enough surplus LNG capacity appears and when enough LNG carriers become available on a spot basis to transport the surplus LNG,'' Leo Drollas, deputy executive director at the Centre for Global Energy Studies, said at the Sparks and Flames conference in Amsterdam.

Qatar is building a new generation of supertankers to ship more gas in one tanker than ever before. The Gulf state plans to produce 77 million tons of the fuel a year by 2010. It has a fleet of the biggest tankers ever built to transport the fuel to buyers around the world.

On mainland Europe and in Asia, gas prices are set by formulas linking them to the cost of crude oil.

``They're going down the oil route, reducing the cost of transporting LNG,'' Drollas said of the Qataris. The so-called Q-Max tankers each cost $290 million and can ship about 250,000 cubic meters of LNG, he said.

LNG is gas chilled to liquid form to aid transportation by ocean-going tankers.

To contact the reporter on this story: Ben Farey in London at bfarey@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: October 8, 2008 13:00 EDT