Delivering Offshore Gas to Regional Mid-Markets - Assessing the Comparative Merits of Floating LNG and CNG Transport Routes

摘要

The emergence and near exponential growth of regional gas markets has been driven by a number of factors, including a decisive shift of the power sector to natural gas fired power stations, the burgeoning demand for gas at city gates, and switch of industrial consumers to natural gas from other fossil fuels. While onshore baseload projects continue to be aggressively pursued for supplying the larger established markets, the emergence of gas and LNG regional mid-markets has stimulated interest in technology solutions directed at the monetization of medium to smaller gas reserves. A significant portion of the potentially exploitable gas reserves today fall into this midtier category. The pressure to bring these mid-tier reserves (estimated to be in the excess of 2,000 Tcf) to the market is compelling. For offshore mid-tier gas fields, the deployment of floating liquefaction units (FLNG) offers an interesting pathway to emerging mid-markets and currently is the subject of much industry focus. Floating CNG (FCNG), prominent in the spotlight in the early 2000s is now re-emerging as a viable gas transportation concept and is offered as an alternative to FLNG for the delivery of gas from mid-tier gas reserves to regional markets. FCNG, for example, offers a dramatic reduction in terminalling costs compared with FLNG. The paper outlines the opportunity domains for application of above technologies (reserve volumes, gas quality, distance to market etc.) and respective readiness for market. It compares and contrasts these competing technologies, assesses their merits in meeting value chain objectives, and evaluates them from a standpoint of scalability and flexibility for redeployment. The paper also reports on the current application status of the technologies, the claims of the respective technology proprietors, and the industry's views of these claims. Concluding the above analysis, the paper focuses, by way of example, on a notional opportunity to demonstrate the competing economic and commercial merits of these alternative approaches to monetization of mid-tier reserves.