When Cheniere Energy in 2008 completed the 1,000 acre expanse on the Louisiana coast of tanks, pipes and roadways that makes up its Sabine Pass liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal, it could hardly have expected what was about to happen. New technology being applied to gas reservoirs in shale rock across the US was on the point of annually bringing hundreds of billions of cubic feet of gas out of the ground.
US natural gas prices – which stood at more than $10 per million British thermal units (mBTU) in 2008 – had fallen as low as $3 by 2012. The import terminal’s economic rationale was, in effect, destroyed.
The turnround has sent Cheniere scrambling to reorganise the terminal and to build further equipment to let it turn US-produced gas into a super-cooled liquid for export round the world. Sabine Pass looks all but certain, when it is ready, to start exporting LNG – probably in late 2015 – and to become the country’s first LNG export terminal.