Tanker Traffic Resumes at Beleaguered Freeport LNG Terminal

Beleaguered Texas-based Freeport LNG saw a second tanker leave for export on Wednesday, less than a week after the first, as the liquified natural gas plant recovers from a series of outages over the past month and a half, Reuters reports. 

According to the news agency, citing data from financial firm LSEG, the Wilforce LNG tanker departed the Freeport terminal with a load of 85% of its capacity. Wilforce was preceded on April 23 by the departure of the first tanker in almost two weeks to have loaded Freeport LNG. As of Wednesday, Reuters said that gas flowing to Freeport for liquefaction was poised to maintain a three-week high of 0.8 bcfd, unchanged from the previous day after incoming gas flows were reduced to nearly nothing late last week. 

For April, Freeport was experiencing incoming average gas flows of 11.9 bcfd, compared to 13.1 bcfd in March and 14.7 bcfd in December. 

Outages have been frequent, recently, with the most recent incident on April 11 when Freeport shut down Train 3, reducing feed gas to almost zero for the last two weeks of the month. 

The departure of the second train from Freeport on Wednesday comes as U.S. LNG exports continue to fall. In April, U.S. LNG exports fell for the fourth consecutive month due to Freeport’s struggles. In total, U.S. LNG exports fell to 6.19 million metric tons in April, compared to 7.61 million metric tons exported in March, based on LSEG data. 

American LNG exports to Europe have also fallen. In March, Europe accounted for 57% of the share of American LNG imports, but by April that figure had fallen to 52.5%, while Asia accounted for 32.6%.

By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com

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