The instinctive way to size an import terminal is by how much LNG it holds. That is the wrong number, and using it produces wrong conclusions about what a country can actually import.
Send-out is the capacity
A terminal exists to put gas into a pipeline. What matters is the rate it can do that, measured in million cubic metres a day, million standard cubic feet a day, or converted to an annual figure for comparison with a liquefaction plant.
Storage volume is a buffer, not a capability. Two terminals with identical tankage can have send-out rates that differ by a factor of three, depending on how many high-pressure pumps and vaporisers are installed behind them. The tanks decide how long the terminal can keep going between cargoes; the pumps and vaporisers decide how much good it can do on any given day.
This is why capacity figures for import terminals should be read as send-out unless something says otherwise, and why comparing an import terminal’s “capacity” against an export terminal’s nameplate is comparing two different quantities that happen to share a unit.
Sized for the worst fortnight
Gas demand in a heating market is violently seasonal. A cold snap can double or triple daily consumption within days, and the network has to meet it or people lose heat.
An import terminal is therefore sized against the peak rather than the average, which means it looks chronically underused. A facility running at a third of its capacity through most of the year is not a mistake or a stranded asset; it is insurance whose premium is paid in idle equipment.
The consequence for reading the data is direct: utilisation figures for import terminals are not efficiency measures. A low annual utilisation may mean the terminal is doing exactly what it was built for.
Peak shaving
Some facilities take this to its conclusion and exist almost entirely for the peak.
A peak shaving plant liquefies gas from the grid during low-demand months, stores it, and vaporises it back into the same grid when demand spikes. There is no ship, no trade, no international dimension at all — it is a storage battery for gas, and it is the oldest use of LNG, predating any cargo crossing an ocean.
Import terminals frequently do the same job as a side effect: holding inventory through the shoulder season specifically so it is available in January.
What actually limits the rate
Vaporisers, most often. They are the largest and least flexible part of the send-out chain, and adding capacity means adding units.
High-pressure pumps, which raise the liquid to grid pressure before it is warmed. Pumps are modular and easier to add than vaporisers, so they are less often the binding constraint.
The grid itself. A terminal can only inject what the network at that point can carry away. A well-sited terminal at a network hub can send out freely; one at the end of a spur can be throttled by downstream pipeline capacity it does not own.
Boil-off handling at the bottom end. Counter-intuitively, very low send-out can be a problem too. The recondenser absorbs boil-off into the LNG stream heading for the pumps, so if that stream is small there is nowhere for the vapour to go and the terminal has to compress it the expensive way. Terminals have a minimum comfortable throughput as well as a maximum.
Where FSRUs differ
A floating unit generally has lower send-out than a large onshore terminal, because there is only so much regasification equipment that fits on a hull, and lower storage for the same reason.
What it has instead is speed of deployment and the ability to leave. For a market that needs supply within a year, or expects to need it for only a few years, a smaller send-out available now beats a larger one available in five.
What the tracker holds
Global Energy Monitor reports terminal capacity in Mtpa and bcm/y, and for import terminals that figure describes throughput rather than storage. The terminal directory shows both units side by side so no conversion is hidden, and storage volume — which GEM does not carry in the fields used here — renders as Not reported.
The traps in reading any of these numbers are set out in reading a capacity figure; the one specific to import terminals is assuming that a big tank means a big terminal.