LNG Canada to introduce gas to facility “this week”
LNG Canada, Canada’s first world-scale LNG export terminal, said August 29 it expected to introduce natural gas to the facility for the first time “this week” to begin its commissioning procedure.
In a project update on its website, the LNG Canada consortium – Shell, Petronas, PetroChina, Mitsubishi and Korean Gas – said that once natural gas was received from the Coastal GasLink pipeline and safety checks completed, a small flare pilot would be ignited at its vapour flare tower, followed by low-level flaring that will occur over several weeks prior to more visible flaring.
Activities will be “closely monitored” with advance notifications to provincial regulators, local governments and First Nations, LNG Canada said.
“The introduction of natural gas and flaring activities mark a pivotal step in LNG Canada’s safe start-up program as we prepare to ship our first cargoes of made-in-BC LNG by the middle of 2025,” it said.
Although commercial deliveries from the 14mn tonnes/year LNG Canada terminal are still set for mid-2025, Martin King, an analyst with Houston-based RBN Energy wrote in a recent blog post that commissioning cargoes could be loaded before the end of the year.
“LNG Canada appears to be on the cusp of its testing phase and is likely to be exporting some cargoes of LNG before the end of this year,” King wrote in a July blog post.
JGC-Fluor, the global joint venture tasked with building and commissioning the LNG Canada facility, said July 9 it had completed the final weld on Train 1 of the two-train facility, while the previous day, Petronas said it would double its North American LNG tanker fleet to six with three new 174,000 m3 tankers built at the Hyundai Heavy Industries shipyard in Ulsan, South Korea.