The Elba Island LNG import terminal near Savannah, Georgia, will soon receive an LNG cargo as the facility continues to send relatively high gas volumes into the regional grid amid a pipeline force majeure.
The Meth Alison Victoria LNG vessel was inside the Savannah river waterway today near the terminal. The ship, which has capacity of 145,000m³, equivalent to about 3 Bcf (1.41bn m³) of gas, is carrying a cargo from Trinidad and Tobago's Atlantic LNG plant, having left that facility on 14 October.
The vessel is controlled by Shell, which has long-term import capacity rights at Elba Island.
The terminal was scheduled to flow today about 128mn cf of regasified LNG into the regional grid, the fourth consecutive day of relatively high send-out to help customers cope with a pipeline force majeure.
US midstream company Kinder Morgan on 17 October declared a force majeure on a segment of its Southern Natural Gas (SoNat) interstate pipeline system near Millen, Georgia, about 80 miles (129km) northwest of Savannah. Send-out from Elba Island that day reached 252mn cf/d, the highest daily flow from the terminal in more than 18 months. Send-out was 143mn cf/d on 18-19 October.
Elba Island connects with SoNat in Georgia and with Transcontinental (Transco) pipeline system along the Georgia-South Carolina border.
The force majeure was declared on SoNat segment 580 because of damage to the 20-inch (51cm) diameter Wrens-Savannah 2nd Loop line. It is still in effect.
Send-out from Elba Island averaged about 11mn cf/d on 1-16 October. It averaged about 26mn cf/d in January, about one-third of the average flow of 75mnc f/d in January 2015.
Elba Island's LNG imports and send-out declined significantly after the 189-mile Elba Express pipeline that connects the terminal to Transco started bidirectional service on 1 April 2013. That allowed Elba Island customer BG to meet some contractual commitments in Georgia with cheap domestic gas rather than more expensive LNG imports. BG, which was acquired by Shell earlier this year, started sending LNG that otherwise would have come into Elba Island to higher-paying markets.
Elba Island imported a gas equivalent of 11.8 Bcf last year, a 64pc increase from 7.2 Bcf 2014, as the US became a more attractive destination for LNG in 2015 with falling prices and demand in Asia and Europe. Through the first eight months of 2016, Elba Island only received one cargo, with a gas-equivalent volume of about 2.9 Bcf, in March, according to the most recent records available from the US Department of Energy.
Kinder Morgan plans to start building LNG export facilities at Elba Island on 1 November, with exports slated to start about mid-2018. Shell has a 20-year binding contract for the planned baseload liquefaction capacity of 2.5mn t/yr, equivalent to 350mn cf/d (9.9mn m³/d) of gas, and peak capacity of 4mn t/yr.
