LNG terminal owners get creative to counter slowdown

Houston Chronicle ^ | Jan. 31, 2009, 1:51AM | TOM FOWLER

[thackney]

Freeport LNG, the privately owned terminal that opened on Quintana Island south of Houston last spring, filed for a license to re-export LNG, letting it serve as a temporary storage site for overseas producers, said Bill Henry, vice president of regulatory affairs at the site. It’s also adding equipment to reliquefy any LNG that “boils off” over time, so storage levels stay steady for long periods.

Cheniere Energy also commissioned a new LNG terminal last year, a massive facility south of Port Arthur on the Louisiana side of the Sabine Pass. Aside from a few commissioning shipments, the terminal hasn’t seen much traffic. Like the Freeport plant, it has applied for a re-export license, spokeswoman Diane Haggard said. A $250  million cash infusion from investors last summer means the facility can wait out the market downturn for the next three years, she said.

Excelerate Energy, which is building a fleet of tankers that can re-gasify LNG onboard for offloading to terminals buoyed offshore, opened its second such terminal last year, the Northeast Gateway, 13 miles off the coast of Boston.

[thackney]

And another related article:

Natural gas glut could hit U.S.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/business/energy/6239863.html
Jan. 31, 2009, 1:47AM

As many as seven massive natural gas export terminals are expected to start up overseas this year, expanding worldwide capacity by 20 percent and flooding markets with new supplies of the key power plant and heating fuel. Dozens of new tankers capable of carrying natural gas in a liquefied form are slated to hit the seas.

Just as these new supplies come on line, worldwide demand is expected to drop as the global recession deepens.

Operators of these new facilities are unlikely to cut back production, however, so shipments of liquefied natural gas will most likely head to the deepest markets with the greatest amount of natural gas storage capacity — the United States.

‘Counterintuitive’
“It’s completely counterintuitive,” said Murray Douglas, a global LNG analyst with Wood Mackenzie in Houston, who is predicting U.S. LNG imports will grow 30 percent to 456 billion cubic feet this year and to more than 1.1 trillion cubic feet by 2013.

“We don’t believe Asia and Europe will be in a position to absorb this new production, and the U.S. is the only market that can take it, that has a large amount of storage.”

The wave of imports might even be strong enough to challenge growing domestic natural gas production from various shale formations, including the Barnett Shale near Fort Worth and Fayetteville Shale in Arkansas.

“This can put pressure on U.S. gas prices and could delay the full development of some of the new shale pro-jects,” Douglas said.

< excerpted >

[ladyjane]

There is a LNG terminal right near Logan Airport in Boston. Those tankers sail right past Logan and the condominium where Obasama Bin Laden’s brothers lived. Very high security when they bring a tanker in.