Freeport LNG Says Trains 1, 2 at Texas Facility Seen Shut Until May

Freeport LNG on Wednesday said its Train 2 liquefaction unit at the Texas plant has been shut down, while Train 1 will be taken down imminently as it expects inspections and any subsequent repairs at both the units to be completed by May.

"It was during the January freeze that damage occurred in one of the Train 3 motors. Once we understood the cause of the damage, we knew it would be prudent to take proactive steps to inspect our other two trains," a company spokesperson told Reuters in an email.

Freeport said its Train 3 was now online and producing LNG.

Each liquefaction train at Freeport can turn about 0.7 billion cubic feet per day (bcfd) of gas into LNG.

Earlier in the day, the company said that after maintenance work, Freeport LNG’s production capacity will increase by 10% from 15 million metric tons a year (mpta) to just over 16.5 mtpa roughly by June.

Additionally, the company's Train 4, which has received all regulatory approvals, will add another 25% of LNG production capacity when it becomes operational, it said.

The gas markets' reaction to the news of the outages was muted. U.S. futures were down about 2% to $1.71 per million British thermal units, while European prices were also down about 2% to around $9.07. Both markets were mostly reacting to forecasts for mild weather and ample amounts of gas in storage.

Outages at Freeport LNG, the third biggest LNG export plant in the United States, have caused extreme price moves in U.S. and European gas markets in the past.

U.S. gas futures plunged by 16% to close at $7.19 on June 14, 2022 once it was known that a fire at Freeport earlier in June would keep the plant shut for an extended period.

At the same time in Europe, prices at the Dutch Title Transfer Facility (TTF) soared by 33% over two days from June 14-15 to $34.89 per mmBtu on June 15, 2022.

That fire left Freeport shut for about eight months until February 2023. Since then, the plant has suffered several mostly short-term reductions for various reasons.

Financial firm LSEG said gas flows to the seven big U.S. LNG export plants slid to an average of 13.3 bcfd so far in March, down from 13.7 bcfd in February. That compares with a monthly record of 14.7 bcfd in December.

Analysts do not expect U.S. LNG feedgas to return to record levels until all three liquefaction trains at Freeport return to full service.