British Columbia has exported its first shipment of liquefied natural gas to China.
On November 18, FortisBC quietly saw off its first international shipment of LNG from it Tilbury Island plant
To date, not one of the 20 LNG projects proposed for B.C. has been built. The only functioning LNG plant is the Tilbury Island plant, which is still undergoing a $400 million expansion.
The Tilbury plant was used in the past to produce LNG strictly for backup purposes, in the event of an interruption of gas on its pipelines.
But the company has invested $400 million in an expansion that takes the plant from a production capacity of 5,000 gigjoules per day to 34,000.
Although the expansion was intended mostly to serve a growing domestic LNG market – in the trucking sector, for example – FortisBC has also had an eye to potential small-scale exports.
The shipment that left November 18 for China was a single container, provided by True North Energy Corporation.
“It’s a pilot to test out the viability of all the logistics and the timing and costs of getting it there and then see if it can build into something larger,” said Doug Stout, FortisBC’s vice president of market development and external relations.
FortisBC is also considering additional expansions, including a doubling of the Tilbury Island’s capacity and possibly a larger new plant, about the size of the planned Woodfibre LNG plant in Squamish, at a cost of $1 billion to $2 billion and annual capacity of 1 million to 2 million tonnes per year.
Whereas larger LNG plants would supply LNG on long-term contract basis to large utilities in Asia, FortisBC is targeting small commercial and industrial complexes in China, many of which still use coal or oil-fired heating systems.
“This is replacing coal and oil with natural gas,” Stout said.
