After delays, strikes, and cost overruns, the Panama Canal expansion is finally set to open in April 2016. But the global energy landscape has changed in the eight years since construction began, with opportunities first expanding and now, potentially, contracting. The question today is whether the new canal can still fulfill a promise to transform global LNG trade.
Can The Panama Canal Fulfill Its Global LNG Promise? | OilPrice.com
China, despite voracious demand for all sorts of commodities, has not been a huge consumer of natural gas. It uses coal for most of its electricity generation. Nevertheless, due to an effort to clean up its terrible air pollution, China has been central to corporate forecasts for huge annual increases in global LNG demand. As a result, LNG export projects proliferated around the world.
LNG Bust Could Last For Years | OilPrice.com
Cheniere Energy Inc.’s Sabine Pass terminal, the first complex designed to liquefy and export natural gas from the continental U.S., is being commissioned and is on track to start producing by the end of the year, said Bechtel Corp., the engineering and construction company behind the project. Bechtel is performing the commissioning work alongside Cheniere, Bechtel COO Brendan Bechtel said in an interview at Bloomberg’s headquarters in New York Tuesday. Cheniere is planning six liquefaction plants at the terminal in Louisiana. Five have been contracted and are under construction, Cheniere CEO Charif Souki said in August. The first plant was scheduled to come online by the end of 2015.
Cheniere commissioning Sabine Pass gas terminal, Bechtel says
China Petrochemical Corp., Asia’s biggest refiner, received government approval to build an 8,400-km (5,221-mile) pipeline network to connect gas fields in northwest China to southern and eastern provinces. The project from Xinjiang to Guangdong will have an artery and six regional links, the company, known as Sinopec Group, said in an emailed statement Wednesday. Investment in the pipeline will be about 130 billion yuan ($20 billion). The statement didn’t mention a construction timeframe.
Sinopec gets approval for $20-billion West-East gas pipeline