LNG Canada, under construction for nearly six years on Canada’s West Coast, is rapidly approaching the time when first gas will be entering the plant for testing and calibration of equipment, marking an important transformation for the Western Canadian natural gas market. This will kick off what will likely be about a yearlong testing process before officially entering commercial service in mid-2025. In today’s RBN blog, we consider daily gas flow data from the startup of similar-sized LNG plants on the U.S. Gulf Coast and develop a conjectural timeline for LNG Canada to help assess how much gas will flow to the site — and how soon — and when LNG exports might begin.
The positive vibes continue to build for the startup of LNG Canada, Canada’s first LNG export facility, which is nearing completion outside the town of Kitimat, BC. Originally sanctioned for construction in October 2018 by a five-member consortium of Shell Canada (40%), Petronas (25%), PetroChina (15%), Mitsubishi (15%) and KOGAS (5%), the last five and a half years of hard work have seen the liquefaction plant (red diamond in Figure 1 below) and the pipeline that feeds gas to the site, Coastal GasLink (CGL, blue line), make steady progress toward what is expected to be the onset of commercial operations in the middle of next year.
Figure 1. Coastal GasLink Pipeline to LNG Canada. Source: RBN
The last official update from LNG Canada at the end of 2023 indicated that overall completion of the LNG export facility was pegged at 85%, with more recent industry speculation suggesting that site work is now well in excess of 90% complete. The CGL pipeline, in turn, was declared mechanically complete last November by TC Energy, its primary contractor and operator, meaning the pipe was ready to accept gas for shipment to the Kitimat site. In March, the CEO of LNG Canada made it clear that the site will be receiving gas this year, though a timeline was not specified, in preparation for testing of equipment. That part of the process could take more than a year (which partly motivates this blog).
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