Tangguh to ship less LNG

The Tangguh LNG project in Papua Barat will only be able to deliver a total of 16 cargoes of liquefied natural gas this year, a much lower figure than the 56 cargoes it has contractual committed to, partly as a result of problems in its production line.

Ngurah Kresnawan, a spokesman for energy giant BP — which operates the massive plant — said Thursday that problems at the plant’s production units had resulted in lower production.

The Tangguh LNG plant consists of two production units, each with a production capacity of 3.8 million tons of LNG per year.

BP started the first production unit, called train 1 , in February and the second one, train 2, in July this year, but both are now under repair or examination.

“When we launched train 2 in July, we initially found quite a few problems, which we fixed right away. We expect to reopen train 2 in the next few days.”

“As we are concerned that an identical problem will occur in train 1, we shut it down in August.

“We are carrying out the same maintenance at the first production unit [train 1], and we expect to reopen train 1 in October,” Ngurah told lawmakers from commission VII overseeing energy.