Commissioning for Bangladesh's second LNG import terminal delayed

Bangladesh's second liquefied natural gas (LNG) import terminal is expected to start commissioning in mid-April, a month later than initially expected, officials told Reuters.

Summit Corp, a subsidiary of Singapore-based Summit Power International, and partner Mitsubishi Corp are expected to start commissioning at their floating storage and regasification unit (FSRU) off the country's coast on April 20, a spokeswoman from Summit Corp said on Wednesday.

The FSRU will be named "Summit LNG" and will pick up its commissioning cargo from Ras Laffan in Qatar before sailing to Bangladesh, she said. It is currently dry docked in Ras Laffan Nakilat NKOM yard, she added.

The cargo will be supplied by Qatargas, two industry sources familiar with the matter said.

Operations at the FSRU were expected to start in mid-March, ahead of schedule. The new timeline still puts the arrival of the FSRU ahead of schedule, the spokeswoman said.

"Our economy is expanding and (the second FSRU) will help meeting our growing consumption needs," Nasrul Hamid, Bangladesh's state minister for energy and power, told Reuters.

"We are taking more initiatives to meet the demand."

The FSRU start-up date had also been partially hampered by construction delays on a pipeline that will carry regasified gas from the coastal city of Chattogram, near where the FSRU will be anchored, to the capital Dhaka.

"The work is going on in full swing. We hope we can complete all the connecting pipelines by the end of April," Ali Al-Mamun, managing director of the Gas Transmission Company Limited, a subsidiary of state-owned energy company Petrobangla, said on Wednesday.

"Only the weather could hamper it. If it rains for a day, we need to stop work for the next two days."

Summit LNG's FSRU will anchor 6 km (3.6 miles) off the island of Moheshkali in the Cox's Bazar district of the Chattogram division, where it will regasify LNG procured by Petrobangla.

The planned LNG import volume of the project is about 3.75 million tonnes a year, which will double the country's LNG import capacity to 7.5 million tonnes per year once fully operational.

Bangladesh has scrapped plans to build additional floating LNG terminals in favour of land-based stations after the start-up of the country's first FSRU was delayed by several months due to technical problems and bad weather. (Reporting by Jessica Jaganathan in SINGAPORE and Ruma Paul in DHAKA; editing by Christian Schmollinger)

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