The first liquefied natural gas vessel was headed Thursday for Dominion Energy Inc’s Cove Point LNG export facility in Maryland, with the facility expected to enter service by the end of the year, reports Reuters.
Cove Point will be the second large LNG export terminal in the lower 48 U.S. states, after Cheniere Energy Inc’s Sabine Pass terminal in Louisiana, which exported its first cargo in February 2016.
The vessel, the Maran Gas Delphi, which is currently entering the Chesapeake Bay, is expected to arrive at the $4 billion terminal later Thursday. It can hold about 3.3 billion cubic feet (bcf) natural gas.
One bcf is enough fuel for about 5 million U.S. homes.
With Sabine Pass, Cove Point and a couple of other export terminals under construction, the United States is expected to have the third-biggest LNG export capacity in the world by the end of 2018.
U.S. LNG export capacity is expected to soar from 3.0 billion cubic feet per day (bcfd) now to 3.8 bcfd by the end of the year, 5.3 bcfd by the end of 2018 and 10.1 bcfd by the end of 2019.
Cove Point will be able to produce about 0.75 bcfd of gas.
Last week, Dominion said Royal Dutch Shell Plc will take the initial LNG cargoes from Cove Point.
Dominion sold the project’s capacity for 20 years to a subsidiary of GAIL (India) Ltd and to ST Cove Point, a joint venture of units of Japanese trading company Sumitomo Corp and Tokyo Gas Co Ltd.
Some of the LNG going to ST Cove Point will go to Tokyo Gas and some will go to Kansai Electric Power Co Inc, according to Sumitomo’s Pacific Summit Energy (PSE) LLC unit.
PSE in 2013 agreed to buy 0.35 bcfd of gas from Cabot Oil & Gas Corp’s production in the Marcellus shale in Pennsylvania and West Virginia for 20 years once Cove Point enters service.
There are four 0.7-bcfd liquefaction trains operating at Sabine Pass. A fifth is under construction and expected to enter service in mid-2019.
There is a small LNG exporter in Florida, American LNG Marketing LLC, selling fuel in ISO (International Organization for Standardization) containers to Barbados since 2016, and a big 0.2-bcfd LNG export facility in Alaska at Kenai that entered service in 1969 but has not been active since 2015, according to federal energy data.
