Power Outage Sharply Reduces LNG Canada Gas Intake

On December 12, a power outage to the LNG Canada liquefaction plant in Kitimat, BC resulted in a short-term full shutdown of LNG production activities at the site as reported in RBN’s Canadian NatGas Billboard. According to LNG Canada, a restart of the facility was quickly initiated but gas intake pulled back sharply between December 13 to 16, inclusive (blue square in chart below). Only partial flow data is available on a daily basis for LNG Canada’s gas intake, with our flow model suggesting average gas intake fell to a more than four-month low of 440 MMcf/d for the four-day period but may have fallen to zero for a short period of time shortly after the outage occurred. The two pipelines for which flow data is available did post zero volumes for December 14 to 16, inclusive. The outage comes just days after LNG Canada had initiated a restart and ramping up of Train 2 activity and for which it had just accepted official hand over on December 8 from Fluor Corporation and JGC Corporation, the primary contractors in the construction of Train 2. Train 1 was handed over by Fluor and JGC to the LNG Canada consortium earlier this year.