Dominion Maryland Cove Point LNG export facility returning to service

(Reuters) - Dominion Energy Inc said its Cove Point liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminal in Maryland started to return to service over the weekend following three weeks of maintenance: More than 0.3 billion cubic feet per day (bcfd) of natural gas started to flow to the plant late last week, according to data from Refinitiv.

Map Source: EWA

 

Cove Point, which started exporting LNG in March, is designed to liquefy about 0.75 bcfd of gas. One billion cubic feet of gas is enough to fuel about 5 million U.S. homes for a day.

The company stopped pulling gas into the plant from pipelines around Sept. 21, the Refinitiv data showed.

Dominion spent about $4 billion to add the LNG export terminal to its existing LNG import terminal. It was the second of two big LNG export terminals to enter service in the Lower 48 U.S. states after Cheniere Energy Inc’s Sabine Pass terminal in Louisiana in February 2016.

U.S. LNG export capacity is expected to rise to 8.3 bcfd by the end of 2019 and 9.6 bcfd in 2020 from around 3.8 bcfd in service now.

Dominion sold the liquefaction capacity at Cove Point for 20 years to a subsidiary of Indian energy company GAIL (India) Ltd and ST Cove Point, which is a venture between units of Japanese trading company Sumitomo Corp and Japanese energy company Tokyo Gas Co Ltd.

Some of the LNG going to ST Cove Point will go to Tokyo Gas and some will go to Japanese energy company Kansai Electric Power Co Inc, according to Sumitomo’s Pacific Summit Energy (PSE) unit.

 

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