Cheniere Energy Inc. could wrap up a maintenance blitz at its Sabine Pass LNG export terminal next week. The work went on longer than initially expected but was still on pace to shed far fewer volumes than last year.
The 4.6 Bcf/d Louisiana facility has conducted extensive maintenance in June for the last several years. The terminal accounts for a third of U.S. liquefied natural gas exports.
This year, Cheniere management said it aimed to minimize the impacts of the work with a planned shorter June maintenance schedule than last year. Work at the LNG terminal kicked off on June 3 and was scheduled to run until June 16, but analysts were forced to readjust estimates after a mid-month jump in feed gas volumes turned out to be false hope.
Feed gas flows to Sabine Pass ticked higher to around 4.3 Bcf/d mid-month, but then began a slide down to a 10-month low of about 3.6 Bcf/d on June 21, according to NGI’s North American LNG Export Flow Tracker. The facility has the capacity to bring in about 5.7 Bcf/d of feed gas volumes.
“After flows improved on June 16-17, it was looking like they would be completing maintenance early and ramping to a normal rate, but since that point we have seen inflows fall,” Criterion Research Inc.’s James Bevan, vice president of Research, said last week.
This week, with Sabine flows still limited, Criterion expects “flows returning toward a normal range of 4.3-4.4 Bcf/d by the end of June, at the latest,” Bevan said on the online energy platform Enelyst on Monday.
Vessel-tracking data also points to an uptick in exports at Sabine Pass. The terminal's exports were expected to increase 14% week/week to 0.52 million tons (Mt) with eight vessels due in the week beginning June 24, according to Kpler.
Exports could drop to 0.45 Mt in the subsequent week with six vessels scheduled to arrive, then soar to the highest level since April at 0.67 Mt with nine vessels due in the week starting July 8, Kpler data shows.
While the Sabine Pass work isn’t on pace to come in much shorter than last year, its impacts have been far less significant. Sabine Pass averaged about 4.1 Bcf/d of feed gas flows in the first 24 days of June, far ahead of the 2.8 Bcf/d averaged over the same days in 2023, according to Wood Mackenzie data. Put another way, the 98.2 Bcf of feed gas that has flowed to the facility this month already exceeds the 90.4 Bcf taken in all of June 2023.
“The June Sabine Pass LNG outage was not as bad as expected, with flows performing far better than the major work seen in June 2023,” Bevan said.
U.S. LNG feed gas demand was pacing around 13.5 Bcf/d in early June before work at the terminal started. The volumes sank to a nearly two-month low of around 11.8 Bcf/d on Friday (June 21) but have since hovered around 12.8 Bcf/d, according to NGI data.
On Tuesday, Cheniere was also scheduled to start two days of work on its Corpus Christi Pipeline. The pipeline supplies feed gas to its Corpus Christi LNG terminal in Texas, but the outage at the pipeline’s Sinton compressor station was not expected to impact gas flows because they have been pacing below the reduced capacity of 2,350 MMcf/d, Wood Mackenzie analyst Inigo Guerra said.
