Introduction

Orders are growing for medium-scale LNG plants -- those capable of liquefying between 0.1 and 2.0 million metric tons annually (15 to 300 million cubic feet per day). The more of these plants that are manufactured, the more competitive suppliers can become.

Some of these units will be used to monetize mid-tier gas reserves, like those in the Donggi field offshore Sulawesi Island in Indonesia. The primary challenge for those developers is to efficiently reduce the size of all systems, from pretreatment to loadout.

Other medium-scale plants will be used to support "rubber-tire pipelines" like those being built in China, Australia and Peru to truck remote gas reserves to domestic markets. One of these projects relies on 500 LNG tanker trucks.

This conference will review initiatives to downscale LNG efficiently so smaller reserves can be monetized. Full-sized liquefaction trains are limited to reserves of roughly 10 trillion cubic feet (~300 billion cubic meters). Medium-scale plants, however, can access much smaller fields in the 0.5 to 5.0 TCF (15 to 150 bcm) range.

Presentations at the conference will review advancements in technology to downscale liquefaction trains, tanks, loadout systems, offshore LNG plants, jettyless and trestleless plants, as well as a case study of a medium-scale project.