MISC Bhd, the world’s largest owner and operator of liquefied natural gas tankers, plans to develop a floating LNG project to explore for gas in Southeast Asia by the second half of 2013, an official said.
MISC, which is working to liquefy the fuel aboard vessels, is also marketing a technology to allow regasification of LNG on a similar platform, Gunaseharan Ganapathy, the company’s vice president of LNG business, said today in Kuala Lumpur.
The company may have partners for the project, he said, declining to provide details.
“We have work ongoing to become a mid-stream player from a transporter,” Ganapathy said at the Gas Asia conference. “We are working on floating LNG solutions.”
The market for liquefaction and regasification vessels, where gas can be chilled and converted back to vapor, may total about US$8.5 billion by 2015, energy consultants Douglas-Westwood Ltd said in a report in December. Floating facilities may cost a third of an onshore plant and take less than half the time to construct, a Citigroup Inc report said in April.
The floating LNG platform will have a capacity of less than 2 million metric tons a year and may be deployed to extract the cleaner-burning fuel from small gas resources, anywhere up to two trillion cubic feet in deposits, in offshore Malaysia and neighboring countries, Ganapathy said. - Bloomberg
