Everything upstream of this point deals in parcels of tens of thousands of cubic metres. Small-scale distribution deals in tens, and it is a different business with different economics wearing the same molecules.
Why it exists
A pipeline is worth building where there is enough sustained demand to pay for it. A great deal of gas demand is not like that: a single factory, a remote town, a mine, a power station on an island, a fleet of trucks, a seasonal load that exists for four months a year.
For all of those, laying pipe is either uneconomic or impossible. Moving the liquid by road is neither.
Truck loading
An import terminal that serves this market has loading bays: a rack where a tanker trailer connects, is purged, and is filled from the terminal’s storage.
The trailers are vacuum-insulated cryogenic vessels holding a few tens of cubic metres — a tiny fraction of a cargo, and enough to run a decent-sized industrial user for days. They are not pressure tankers in the LPG sense; the liquid is cold rather than compressed, exactly as it is everywhere else in the chain.
Loading bays are a modest addition to a terminal, which is why many terminals have them and why the capability tends to appear wherever LNG is already available rather than being planned for from the start.
ISO tanks
The container-shipping answer. A cryogenic tank built inside a standard intermodal frame, so the same box moves by ship, rail and road with no transfer of the liquid.
The advantage is not the tank; it is that every transfer of cryogenic liquid costs product, time and risk, and an ISO tank removes all the intermediate ones. A parcel can leave a terminal in Europe and arrive at a customer inland on another continent having been handled as a container throughout.
The disadvantage is scale. Forty-odd cubic metres at a time is a lot of containers to move a meaningful volume, so ISO tanks serve customers whose demand suits that granularity rather than substituting for a cargo.
Satellite plants
At the receiving end sits a satellite plant: a small storage tank, a vaporiser, pressure control and metering. It is a miniature import terminal fed by road rather than by sea.
The pattern is common enough to be unremarkable in parts of Europe and Asia — a town or an industrial estate with its own local gas network, supplied by a tanker two or three times a week from a terminal a few hundred kilometres away. Users see ordinary piped gas; the delivery mechanism behind it is a truck.
Vehicle and marine fuelling
The same infrastructure supplies LNG as fuel. Heavy trucks running on gas need fuelling stations, and those stations are supplied by tanker from a terminal.
Marine bunkering is the larger version of the same idea, and truck-to-ship is one of its three delivery methods precisely because the road distribution network already existed for other reasons.
Boil-off on the move
A trailer is insulated well enough to hold its contents for days without venting, because the tank can absorb the pressure rise as the liquid warms. Within a normal delivery window the loss is negligible.
Over longer idle periods the pressure eventually reaches the relief setting, and the operator’s choice is to use the gas, transfer it, or vent. Scheduling exists partly to make sure that choice does not arise.
Where this sits in the data
Global Energy Monitor tracks terminals, pipelines and vessels. Road tankers, ISO tanks and satellite plants are none of those, and none of them appears on this site.
What does appear is the terminal at the head of the chain, in the terminal directory, and where a terminal’s role is predominantly small-scale distribution rather than grid supply, the tracker will still record it as an import terminal. That is worth knowing when a terminal’s capacity looks implausibly small for a national supply point: it may not be one.