New Zealand: LNG infrastructure

Chokepoint exposure is shown on each terminal page, taken from a hand-maintained trade-lane table. It is an editorial routing model of typical laden voyages, not vessel tracking. The exposure feed aggregates it by chokepoint.

• How LNG works

  Liquefied natural gas is natural gas chilled to about minus 162 degrees Celsius, at which point it becomes a liquid roughly 600 times smaller than the gas, so it can be shipped where no pipeline runs.

• LNG against pipeline gas

  A pipeline delivers gas at lower cost than LNG over land up to roughly two to four thousand kilometres, beyond which liquefaction wins, and across any significant body of deep water LNG usually wins at any distance.

• Mtpa, bcm and cubic metres

  LNG capacity is quoted in three incompatible units, and the two conversions that matter are 1 million tonnes a year equals about 1.36 billion cubic metres of gas a year, and 1 cubic metre of liquid equals about 600 cubic metres of gas.

• What a tracker can and cannot tell you

  An infrastructure tracker like the Global Gas Infrastructure Tracker reports what public sources say about a project at a point in time, which is a different and narrower thing than reporting what is objectively true about the project right now.