A liquefaction plant is arranged around two constraints that no amount of engineering can move: where the water is deep enough for a ship, and how far apart things have to be.
The sequence
Gas arrives, is treated, is liquefied, is stored, and is loaded. The site follows that order, because pumping a cryogenic liquid further than necessary costs insulation, pipe and heat leak.
Around the sequence sit the things every process plant has and nobody photographs: utilities, power generation, cooling water or air coolers, the control building, the flare, and a great deal of pipe rack.
The jetty
The marine facility is frequently the single most expensive item after the trains themselves, and the reason is geography. Large vessels need deep water; deep water is usually offshore; the tanks are inland. Something has to bridge the gap.
That something is a trestle carrying insulated pipework, sometimes for well over a kilometre where the seabed shelves gently. At the end sits the berth itself: a loading platform with the arms, breasting dolphins the ship rests against, and mooring dolphins holding it in place.
Dredging is often the hidden cost. A berth is only usable if the approach and the turning basin are deep enough, and maintaining that depth against siltation is a permanent operating expense rather than a one-off.
Loading rates and why a berth is a bottleneck
Typical loading runs at 10,000 to 12,000 cubic metres an hour, so a conventional cargo takes roughly twelve hours of pumping. Add mooring, connecting, purging and cooling the arms, pre-transfer checks, ramp-up, then draining, disconnecting and the custody transfer measurement, and the port call is closer to a full day.
Now count cargoes. A plant producing several million tonnes a year ships hundreds of them, and a single berth has a finite number of days. Allow for weather downtime, maintenance and the occasional vessel arriving off schedule, and the arithmetic forces a second berth well before it feels necessary.
This is why large plants have multiple jetties, and why berth availability rather than production is sometimes what limits a terminal’s throughput.
Separation distances
The spacing between blocks is not architectural preference. It comes from hazard analysis.
Thermal radiation. If a credible fire occurs, how much heat reaches the next item, the site boundary and the jetty? Distances are set so that people can escape and equipment does not fail in cascade.
Vapour dispersion. If a spill occurs, how far does the flammable cloud travel before it dilutes below its lower limit? That distance sets the exclusion zone and frequently determines whether a site is viable at all.
The consequence is that an LNG plant occupies far more land than its equipment does. Storage sits well away from trains; trains sit well apart from one another; the jetty sits away from both. On a constrained coastal site this is often the binding constraint, and it is a large part of why floating liquefaction exists — a hull is not subject to a neighbour’s planning objection.
Why trains are repeated rather than enlarged
A plant grows by adding trains, and the reasons are as much commercial as technical.
Each train is a discrete investment that can be sanctioned when its offtake is contracted, so a project can be built in stages against demand rather than all at once. Common facilities — jetty, storage, utilities, control — are shared, so the second train is meaningfully cheaper than the first. And a failure takes out one train rather than the plant.
This is also why a single site can hold trains at three different statuses at once, and why adding capacity at different statuses together produces a meaningless number.
The flare
Every plant has one, and what matters is how much it is used. Flaring exists to dispose safely of gas that must be released during upsets, start-up and shutdown. A well-run plant in steady operation flares very little.
Persistent flaring generally means something upstream is wrong — a compressor down, a unit tripped, feed arriving that cannot be processed. It is visible from a long way away, which makes it one of the few plant conditions outsiders can observe directly.
What the data holds
The terminal pages carry what Global Energy Monitor reports: location, capacity by status, ownership, operator, start years. Berth count, jetty length, storage volume and train arrangement are not in the map export this site is built from, and render as Not reported rather than being inferred from photographs or plant descriptions.
Where physical relationships are shown — pipelines passing within 25 km of a terminal — the basis is proximity and the pages say so, because a pipeline near a terminal is not necessarily a pipeline feeding it.