Gas market players have maintained a sanguine outlook amid the energy crisis stemming from the Mideast war and its disruption of around 20% of global LNG flows. Despite some early signs of price-induced demand destruction, the consensus coming out of the annual Flame conference in Amsterdam was that impacts from the crisis will be largely short-term once traffic resumes through the Strait of Hormuz. With growth markets in Asia still hungry for gas, little demand left to cut in Europe and new supplies from the US and elsewhere able to partially fill the supply gap, delegates believe the medium- to long-term trajectory of global gas demand remains robust. Asia, the growth engine for global gas demand, is the biggest buyer of Mideast LNG and thus has been hit hard by the crisis. Asia-Pacific LNG imports from the Mideast fell by 33% in the first four months of 2026, to 12.3 million tons, compared to the same period in 2025, according to data from ship tracker Kpler. The sharp decline from suppliers like Qatar and the UAE has had a near-immediate impact: "If you're looking at [gas] demand, clearly with the conflict in the Middle East, what we are seeing is a reduction of demand: There is less injection in [gas] storage, there is fuel switching and most countries now are producing power from coal," Marco Saalfrank, head of merchant trading for Swiss-based Axpo Solutions, told the conference. Ingvar Egeland, head of LNG for Equinor, told Energy Intelligence that high prices earlier this decade destroyed a lot of demand in Europe, but what remains there is "base demand" and unlikely to fall further.