Track 4 of 7
Receiving and regasifying
What an import terminal does with a cargo once it arrives: storage, vaporisation, send-out into the grid, and the floating units that do the same job without the onshore construction.
An import terminal is the simpler end of the chain and the more varied one. It has to receive a ship, store the liquid, warm it back into gas and push it into a pipeline network at whatever rate the market wants, which in a cold snap is a great deal more than the average.
The choices that distinguish one terminal from another are mostly about heat and speed. Where the sea is warm, seawater vaporisers do the work almost for free; where it is not, a terminal burns part of its own throughput. Where a country needs supply within a year rather than five, a moored vessel does the job of the whole facility and can leave when it is no longer needed.
This track also covers what happens past the terminal fence: trucking, ISO tanks and the small-scale distribution that reaches places no pipeline serves.
7 modules
1 written so far; the rest are listed in the order they will be published.
- 01What an import terminal actually doesplanned
- 02FSRU versus onshore regasification
An FSRU is a ship that stores LNG and turns it back into gas while moored, doing the job of an onshore import terminal without the onshore construction.
- 03Vaporiser types: ORV, SCV and ambient airplanned
- 04Send-out, peak shaving and the grid connectionplanned
- 05Storage, ageing, stratification and rolloverplanned
- 06Truck loading, ISO tanks and small-scale distributionplanned
- 07Break bulk and island supply chainsplanned
Vocabulary for this track
16 terms, defined in full in the glossary.