The LNG chain as usually described assumes both ends are large. A liquefaction plant makes millions of tonnes a year; a receiving terminal takes cargoes of seventy-odd thousand tonnes and pushes gas into a national grid.
An enormous number of places do not work like that, and break bulk is how they get supplied.
The mismatch
A conventional cargo is roughly 174,000 cubic metres of liquid, around 78,000 tonnes. A small island market might consume that in a year.
Even if it could use the volume, it usually cannot receive it. A large carrier needs deep water, a long berth, loading arms, and enough storage ashore to take the cargo in a single discharge. Dredging a harbour and building a full terminal for a market of that size is not a proposition anyone finances.
How break bulk works
A hub terminal — a conventional import terminal with the ability to reload — receives the full cargo normally. Instead of only sending gas into a grid, it loads parcels back out.
Those parcels go by small carrier, typically a few thousand to thirty thousand cubic metres, or by barge for short coastal runs, or into ISO tanks and road tankers for anything that can be reached overland.
The receiving end is a small terminal or a satellite plant, sized for what the market actually uses.
Reloading turns a terminal into a hub
The capability that makes this possible is reloading: pumping LNG from the terminal’s tanks back onto a ship.
Not every import terminal can do it. Those that can gain two roles rather than one. They become redistribution hubs for their region, and they become trading assets — a cargo can be received, held, and sent somewhere more valuable when the arbitrage opens, which is a commercial capability quite separate from supplying the local grid.
Ship-to-ship as the alternative
Break bulk does not always need a terminal in the middle. Ship-to-ship transfer moves a parcel directly from a large carrier to a small one, at anchor or at a sheltered mooring, with no shore infrastructure at all.
That is how some island chains are supplied and how Arctic transshipment works, though for a different reason — there the constraint is the ship rather than the market.
What it costs
More per unit delivered, on every axis.
Handling is duplicated: the cargo is loaded, discharged, loaded again and discharged again. Small vessels are less efficient per cubic metre than large ones and their boil-off is proportionally higher, because the tank surface area per unit of cargo is greater. The receiving infrastructure serves low volumes, so its fixed costs are spread thin.
None of that is an argument against it. Break bulk exists where the alternative is not cheaper gas but no gas — diesel generation, fuel oil, or nothing.
Why it is growing
Three things have pushed it along. Emission rules have made heavy fuel oil less attractive for island power generation. Bunkering has created demand for small parcels at ports for an unrelated reason, and the same vessels serve both. And the small-scale fleet has grown enough that chartering one is no longer a bespoke arrangement.
What the tracker shows, and does not
Global Energy Monitor records LNG terminals, and both the hub and the small receiving terminals appear in the directory as import terminals with their own capacity and status.
What is not in the data is the relationship between them. Nothing in the tracker says that one terminal supplies another, or that a facility has reloading capability, so the structure of a regional break-bulk chain has to be inferred from geography and capacity rather than read off. Where a very small import terminal appears near a much larger one, that is frequently what you are looking at — but this site will not assert it, because the source does not.