Change in Tactics: Tellurian Begins Taking Orders for Driftwood LNG
Driftwood LNG, a 27.6 million tonnes of LNG per year facility that will cost on the order of $14.5 billion to build has not made an official final investment decision (FID) to proceed with the FERC-approved project, yet. However, construction began on the project in March 2022 (see Tellurian Begins Construction of Driftwood LNG with No FID). Chairman of the Board and Founder of Tellurian, Charif Souki, has changed tactics in how he will fund the Driftwood project several times. Recently, Souki tried to find enough equity investors to make the project happen–but that hasn’t worked out. Last week, Souki said he’s now willing to sign companies on long-term contracts without an equity commitment.
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Driftwood LNG, a 27.6 million tonnes of LNG per year facility that will cost on the order of $14.5 billion to build, has not made an official final investment decision (FID) to proceed with the FERC-approved project. However, construction began on the project in March 2022 (see 
Last November, after months of carping and complaining, the (at that time) three Democrats who serve as commissioners for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) flipped and voted with the two Republican commissioners to approve Commonwealth LNG’s plan to erect a new LNG export plant in Cameron Parish, La. (see 
In July 2020, Dominion Energy announced it had decided to exit the natural gas pipeline business by selling it to Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Energy (see 
When a government agency says it will “study” something, that means you can kiss it goodbye. It’s lights out. Our country has a serious problem: insufficient pipelines to get natural gas where it needs to go. In June 2020, during the Trump administration, the U.S. Department of Transportation’s (DOT) Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), in coordination with the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), published final rules to allow LNG to be safely transported by special rail cars (see 
Last week, MDN told you about the third and final public hearing held by the Pennsylvania House Philadelphia LNG Natural Gas Export Task Force (see 
Hurricane Idalia made landfall in the “big bend” region of Florida on the morning of Aug. 30 as a Category 3 storm, then lost speed as it crossed the state, downgrading to a Category 1 as it pushed into Georgia, knocking out power to hundreds of thousands of customers and reducing power and natural gas demand along with power prices. One of the consequences of the storm was/is an impact on the shore of Georgia, where the Elba Island LNG export facility is located. While we don’t have a post-storm update (yet), we can tell you that the Marcellus/Utica flowing to Elba Island was reduced by roughly 30% going into the storm.
There is trouble brewing along the Gulf Coast between Venture Global LNG and its biggest customers: BP, Shell, Edison International (an Italian utility company), Repsol, and GALP Energia (a Portuguese energy company). Venture Global is building the Calcasieu Pass LNG export facility in southwestern Louisiana’s Cameron Parish, less than 50 miles south of Lake Charles. While Venture Global is still working on completing Calcasieu Pass, it has, so far, shipped some 177 cargoes of LNG, much of that during the mega-high prices of last year when the Russia/Ukraine war was at its peak. Yet none of those cargoes went to the facility’s contracted customers, causing trouble.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) is reporting feed gas (natural gas) delivered to LNG export facilities for the first six months of this year hit a new all-time average high of 12.8 Bcf/d (billion cubic feet per day). We hit that high after the Freeport LNG facility finally came back online following a June 2022 explosion, knocking it offline for more than nine months (see 
Yesterday MDN brought you jammed-packed news about EQT Corporation, the country’s largest natural gas driller and producer, from the company’s second quarter update (see 
An Exxon Mobil executive told the Nikkei news service his company is looking to nearly double the volumes of liquefied natural gas (LNG) it is handling to more than 40 million tons per annum (MTPA) by 2030. Exxon currently handles roughly 22 MTPA now. The company plans to invest in LNG projects, offshore oil in Guyana and South America, and in U.S. shale (the Permian). What about the Marcellus/Utica?
Cheniere Energy CEO Jack Fusco dropped a verbal bomb at the LNG 2023 conference held last week in Vancouver, British Columbia (Canada). Fusco told journalists that his company “will likely build a pipeline” that connects to other pipelines to flow even more natural gas to its Sabine Pass LNG export facility that sits near Sabine Lake, close to the Gulf Coast. The motivation is to get more gas for a planned “stage 5” expansion of the Sabine Pass facility, designed to liquefy and export an additional 20 million tonnes per annum (MTPA) of LNG.
In April 2022, MDN told you about Nopetro LNG’s plans to construct and operate as many as three liquefaction trains in Port St. Joe, Florida, that will liquefy up to 3.86 billion cubic feet (Bcf) per year of natural gas for export and delivery to markets in the Caribbean, Central America, and South America (see 
Yesterday, Japan’s JERA Co. Inc. and Korea Gas Corp. (KOGAS) announced a new initiative called the Coalition for LNG Emission Abatement toward Net-zero (“CLEAN”). The private-public initiative has the support of the governments of Japan, South Korea, Australia, the U.S., and Europe, whose representatives signed a framework agreement for creating a mechanism to monitor methane emissions. “To support the Coalition, Japan and the European Commission expressed their vision to create a globally aligned methane emission assessment of LNG projects and to incentivize methane mitigation by LNG producers by facilitating the information collection process of methane leakage counter measures and methane reduction targets,” a joint statement by the allies said.