Cheniere faces ruling on gas leak US sees as ‘serious hazard’

Bloomberg

America’s first exporter of liquefied natural gas from shale is awaiting a federal ruling on whether it can restart storage tanks it was forced to shut after a leak.
Regulators ordered Cheniere Energy Inc. to take two of the five tanks at its Sabine Pass LNG export terminal in Louisiana out of service last month, citing a potentially “serious hazard to people and property” from a gas release discovered in late January. The agency may decide next week whether Cheniere can bring the tanks back online.
Since shipping the first cargo from Sabine Pass in 2016, Cheniere has been a key player in America’s march towards becoming a major global LNG supplier to rival Australia. Though gas flows to Sabine Pass — one of only two operating US export terminals — have remained fairly stable, that could change if regulators force additional tanks to shut. That’s a possibility Cheniere sees as remote.
“There was no discussion” at a regulatory hearing in Houston of “broadening the scope to other tanks being shut,” Cheniere spokesman Eben Burnham-Snyder said in an email. The shutdown of the two tanks has no impact on production, he said.
During a hearing held in Houston, Cheniere argued that the gas release posed no public threat and that any leak could be contained on-site without affecting waterways and highways. The tank shutdown at Sabine Pass has “limited their available storage capacity, but we have not yet seen an impact on liquefaction or exports,”
A report from the manufacturer, Tulsa based Matrix Service Co., showed almost a dozen instances of gas leaking from one Sabine Pass tank into the space between its inner and outer walls between 2008 and 2016, the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration said. Such incidents can create cracks that would allow the gas to escape into the atmosphere.