Excelerate Energy has just celebrated its first year in Bangladesh, where it provided a complete package, including an FSRU, to Petrobangla for the country’s first LNG import terminal.
Steven Kobos said the gas has had a huge impact on Chittagong, Bangladesh’s second-largest city, bringing 550MW of power stations, two fertiliser plants and steel production back online and increasing residential supply.
He was also keen to flag up what his company achieved off Boston on the US north-east coast in January and February, when it hooked up two FSRUs, the Exemplar (built 2010) and Express (built 2009), to its offshore buoy.
Kobos said the company flowed 6bn cubic feet of gas into that market over those two months.
“By doing that and injecting modest amounts into the system at the right time, we smashed the cost of natural gas, so consumers in New England paid somewhere between $1bn and $1.3bn less in heating and electricity costs last [winter] because we were offshore Boston.”
Oil-fired power generation plummeted, he said, with a resulting drop in CO2 emissions — the equivalent of six million fewer cars on the road in that period.
Will the company do this again? “What I’m looking for is a long-term commitment from the region that matches or exceeds opportunities elsewhere in the world,” he replied.
Kobos thinks of Excelerate as a midstream energy play and said its oil-and-gas magnate backer, George Kaiser, has “tremendous enthusiasm” and “vision” for the company.
“He has a large energy group, so I have my eye out for other things aside from purely a shipping play,” Kobos said, explaining that in the right market the company will look for different ways to move downstream.
Excelerate is examining some shore-based liquefaction in Argentina, he revealed. “I think there are no small expectations in the Kaiser organisation and we thrive on high expectations.”
