US LNG project coming back online following hurricane-induced damage and outage

With initial repairs nearing the end, a liquefied natural gas (LNG) export project in Texas, United States (U.S.), is anticipated to return to partial production during the week, after it sustained damage in the onslaught of Hurricane Beryl.

While Beryl’s winds reached category five strength two weeks ago, becoming the earliest Atlantic storm to do so in June/July given how quickly it developed, the danger intensity lessened before it made landfall on the Texas coast, thus, the projections indicated that it would not impact the most prominent offshore platforms and drilling locations in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico. As a result, no major impact on offshore oil and gas production was anticipated. 

While all three Freeport LNG trains were put into offline mode on July 7, Beryl brought strong winds and heavy rainfall the following day, wreaking havoc once it reached Texas and causing damage to the 15 million mt/year terminal’s fin fan air coolers, which are required to dissipate heat at liquefaction plants.

According to the company’s spokesperson, initial repairs are being completed, thus, the first train is anticipated to be restarted this week with the liquefaction operations at the remaining two expected to return to service in phases. Five LNG vessels are said to be floating offshore near Freeport since last week.

“Production levels after restart will be at reduced rates for a period of time as we continue repairs while operating the facility. Production will steadily ramp up to full rates as these repairs are completed,” explained the spokesperson.

Freeport LNG embarked on the development of the liquefaction project in 2010, with the construction phase coming a few years later in late 2014. Each of the terminal’s liquefaction trains can produce more than 600 MMcf/d of LNG.

With an additional LNG train (Train 4) under development, the facility is set to expand its capacity to over 20 mpta. Train 4 will use electric motors with variable frequency drive for the cooling and liquefaction compression power to curb emissions, just like the first three trains.