Freeport LNG Faces Month-Long Unit Outage Due to Winter Storm

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Freeport LNG expects one of the three gas liquefaction units at its Texas plant to be out of service for a month after it faced a technical issue during Winter Storm Heather, the company said on Friday.

Heather is the name given to a deep freeze that spread across Texas and much of the U.S. earlier this month, placing high demand on the state’s power grid.

“One of our refrigeration electric motors at our liquefaction facility experienced an electrical issue that will necessitate a replacement of the motor with an on-hand spare,” a company spokesperson said.

One of Freeport’s three liquefaction units, called Train 2, shut on Jan. 16 and then again on Jan. 22, while Train 3 shut on Jan. 17, according to company filings with Texas environmental regulators.

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Each of the three trains at Freeport can turn about 0.7 billion cubic feet per day of gas into LNG. One billion cubic feet of gas is enough to supply about 5 million U.S. homes for a day.

The amount of natural gas flowing to the seven big U.S. liquefied natural gas export plants has fallen by around 6% so far in January from a record high in December, due mostly to the slow return of feedgas from last week’s Arctic freeze.

(Reporting by Deep Vakil in Bengaluru; Editing by Jan Harvey)