Compressor fire blamed for shutdown of three liquefaction units at Elba LNG terminal

Houston — Kinder Morgan is investigating the cause of a compressor fire that the company said is the reason it shut down three liquefaction units at its Elba LNG facility in Georgia earlier this week.

A fourth unit that was being commissioned was taken offline for maintenance.

There was no observable gas flow to the facility Thursday for the second day in a row, according to Platts Analytics data. A spokeswoman could not immediately say when the offline units will be back up.

The smallest of the six major US LNG export facilities has a 20-year offtake agreement with its sole customer, Royal Dutch Shell.

Elba, which shipped its first cargo in December 2019, will have a capacity of 2.5 million mt/year when all 10 trains planned for the facility are completed. Kinder Morgan has previously said all the trains would be complete in 2020.

The terminal — originally built to import LNG and later converted to handle exports after the US shale revolution — utilizes Shell's Movable Modular Liquefaction System design.

In a statement to S&P Global Platts Wednesday, Kinder Morgan said that three of the units recently experienced an "unforeseen outage." In a followup email, the company said the outage was the result of a fire earlier this week in a mixed refrigerant compressor of its MMLS Unit 2.

The unit was shut and the fire extinguished by firefighting equipment on site. The company shut two adjacent MMLS units, Units 1 and 3, as a precaution. There were no injuries.

Appropriate regulatory agencies were notified, and an investigation into the cause of the fire is underway, Kinder Morgan said.

The global LNG market has been hit hard by weak demand and low international prices, exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic. Several US terminals have received cancellations for cargoes that were scheduled to be delivered in June and later in the summer.