Cheniere Delays First LNG Shipment from Sabine Pass Terminal

 

The Houston-based company now forecasts that its first shipment will not leave its Sabine Pass plant until late February or March 2016, a slip from a planned January departure.

 

Construction of the first liquefaction train at the terminal was completed ahead of schedule, Cheniere said, but the firm said that new instrumentation issues discovered during commissioning will take several weeks to address. 

 

"We are now expecting the first cargo in late February or March," said Neal Shear, Interim President and CEO. "Construction for Trains 2-5 continues to be on an accelerated schedule and these trains are expected to come on-line on a staggered basis.”

 

Despite the delay, the Sabine Pass facility is slated to be the first in the lower 48 states to ship LNG overseas.

 

Other projects have faced delays in loading their first commissioning cargoes. Australia Pacific LNG, a project similar to Sabine Pass, where exports that were scheduled to begin in mid-June weren’t shipped until earlier this month.

 

Cheniere Partners owns 100 percent of the Sabine Pass LNG terminal located on the Sabine-Neches Waterway less than four miles from the Gulf Coast. 

 

The Sabine Pass LNG terminal includes existing infrastructure of five LNG storage tanks with capacity of approximately 16.9 billion cubic feet equivalent (Bcfe), two docks that can accommodate vessels with nominal capacity of up to 266,000 cubic meters and vaporizers with regasification capacity of approximately 4.0 Bcf/d.