From Bloomberg via gCaptain:
Giant ocean-going tankers built the liquefied natural gas industry
into a $150-billion-a-year business. The next expansion opportunity may
come from ships a seventh of the normal size.
Fifty-five years after the first commercial LNG tanker sailed from
Algeria, this segment of the gas industry is pushing into ever more
niche markets, upending the economics of energy supply in the process.
Its next leap forward will be serving customers whose ports or
budgets are too small to handle regular LNG tankers. Known as
small-scale LNG, the idea is to make the fuel chilled to minus
160-degrees Celsius (256 Fahrenheit) accessible to factories, trucks,
ships and even households. That’s set to spur production capacity growth
of 58% over the next five years, more than double the pace of the
industry in total.
“We are just at the end of the beginning,” said Andrew Pickering, the
chief executive officer of Avenir LNG Ltd. a London-based supplier set
up less than a year ago to focus on the small end of the business. “Let
the established players continue to develop large scale and see how we
can connect the two.”
LNG already is the quickest growing part of the fossil fuel industry
as customers switch away from more polluting forms of energy like coal.
The super-chilled fuel is helping reduce smog in cities, it’s bringing
affordable energy to isolated markets and even become a bargaining chip
in U.S. trade talks.
The International Gas Union classifies a small-scale LNG vessel as
one with capacity under 30,000 cubic meters. That’s about 1/7th of the
biggest tankers from Qatar, the worlds’ biggest LNG producer....
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