Excelerate Energy has conducted 124 full cargo LNG ship-to-ship transfers, equating to 15 million cubic metres of product, in a variety of situations and configurations.
Speaking at IBCI’s FLNG 2011 conference in London this week, Edward Scott, senior vice president of Excelerate’s Energy Development Group, said two of the LNG STS transfers conducted in open water had been gas cool-down cargo operations for vessels.
In port, Excelerate has carried out 54 STS transfers with vessels moored in a double bank configuration, 58 with the ships in tandem formation, and two across the dock.
Scott said the operations have involved 97 third-party vessels.
He explained to delegates that the time required to transfer around 130,000 cbm of LNG, starting from a vessel’s initial approach to its separation and departure, is about 38 hours given transfer rates of about 6,000 cbm per hour.
Scott said the company is starting to see STS used to consolidate multiple cargoes and distribute volumes to multiple destinations through a parcelling process.
He added that Excelerate is also seeing a much broader interest in lightering of larger LNG carriers, which are port restricted, as well as for casualty response.
“We believe ship-to-ship transfers form an integrated part of the LNG industry and will continue to grow from here,” the Excelerate man concluded.
