American Oil and Gas Reporter - February 2019 - 62

SpecialReport: Unconventional Resource Science
liquefaction and export facility on the
East Coast. The single-train terminal
shipped its first U.S.-produced gas in
March 2018 and officially commercialized
operations in April 2018.
During the first months of operation,
the facility's feed gas receipts mostly had
averaged below capacity. That changed
in late 2018, once the terminal returned
from extended maintenance and upstream
pipeline projects along key feed gas supply

routes were completed, namely Transco's
Atlantic Sunrise and Columbia Gas Transmission's WB Xpress. From April through
August, the facility's feed gas receipts
averaged about 0.6 Bcf/d, but with the
Atlantic Sunrise and WB Xpress projects
on line, those flows reached full capacity
of just under 0.8 Bcf/d, at least until extreme cold weather hit the Northeast at
the end of January (Figure 2).
This is the first winter that the facility

FIGURE 2
Cove Point LNG Feed Gas Receipts

FIGURE 3
Corpus Christi LNG Feed Gas Receipts

62 THE AMERICAN OIL & GAS REPORTER

has been commercialized and operating
at full capacity, and Cove Point's export
economics may be susceptible to local
demand and related price spikes during
the winter. However, barring any extreme
weather events that turn the economics
upside down for exports, all indications
point to sustained feed gas demand of
close to 0.8 Bcf/d at Cove Point from
here on.
Cheniere's Corpus Christi liquefaction
project along the La Quinta Channel initially involved building two large-scale
(4.5-MMtpa) liquefaction trains (equivalent
to ~1.3 Bcf/d of feed gas demand), but in
May 2018, Cheniere reached an FID for
a third large-scale train as part of stagetwo development. Cheniere also has proposed building an additional seven midscale trains (~1.4-MMtpa each) as part
of a third stage of expansion for completion
in 2021, but that is still in the early, preFID phase.
Train 1 is now more than two months
into its testing phase, and in early November, Cheniere announced an accelerated schedule, indicating full completion
in first-quarter 2019 rather than the original
second-quarter timeline. The unit produced
its first LNG volumes in November and
exported its first commissioning cargo in
early December. Train 2 is on pace to
bring the unit on line early in the second
quarter.
The site sits just northeast of the Agua
Dulce gas trading hub, near a key corridor
of inter- and intrastate Texas pipelines-
mostly legacy long-haul systems-that run
along the Texas Gulf Coast. Most of
these originally were designed to move
gas northbound, but have undergone modifications, including flow reversals and
expansions to accommodate the growing
LNG export demand along the Gulf Coast,
as well as growing gas demand in Mexico.
Thus far, feed gas flows to the plant have
bounced between 100 MMcf/d on the
low side and just above 600 MMcf/d on
the high side since late November, a
trend that is typical of the testing phase.
More recently, in mid- to late-January,
flows dropped to near zero as the facility
ramped down for maintenance on its flare
system (Figure 3).
Between Train 5 at Sabine Pass and
Train 1 at Corpus Christi, total feed gas
demand for LNG exports climbed some
2 Bcf/d (80 percent) through the fourth
quarter to average 4.9 Bcf/d in the final
10 days of 2018. Even if feed gas deliveries
stayed at that level through the first quarter

American Oil and Gas Reporter - February 2019

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