Dominion shuts Maryland Cove Point LNG export facility for maintenance

(Reuters) - Dominion Energy Inc said on Monday it started a scheduled three-week maintenance outage at the Cove Point liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminal in Maryland. 

Dominion made the announcement in part because it flared some gas at the plant as part of the normal process of depressurizing equipment, which temporarily caused a strong, harmless odor usually associated with natural gas that has been odorized to aid in leak detection and repair.

The plant stopped pulling gas into the plant from pipelines on Sept. 21, according to Thomson Reuters data.

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

U.S. LNG export capacity is expected to rise to 8.3 billion cubic feet per day (bcfd) by the end of 2019 and 9.6 bcfd in 2020 from 3.8 bcfd in service now.

 One bcfd can power about 5 million homes.

Cove Point, which started producing LNG in March, is designed to liquefy about 0.75 billion cubic feet per day (bcfd) of natural gas.

Dominion sold the project’s capacity for 20 years to a subsidiary of GAIL (India) Ltd and to ST Cove Point, a joint venture of units of Japanese trading company Sumitomo Corp and Tokyo Gas Co Ltd.

 

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