Tellurian Plans to Make a Final Investment Decision on Two LNG Trains in 2024

Tellurian eyes the final investment decision for the first two trains of its Driftwood LNG plant before the end of this year.

The news comes soon after the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission granted the company a three-year extension of the construction permit for the long-delayed Driftwood project.

Construction work is already underway at Driftwood, Tellurian said in a corporate presentation this week, adding that it expects to make the final investment decision on the third train of the facility in Lake Charles, Louisiana, between six and nine months following the FIDs for the first two trains.

The Driftwood project will have a capacity of 27.6 million tons of liquefied natural gas annually and will not be subject to the recent pause in LNG export capacity approvals enacted by the Biden administration. There is a potential to expand this to 60 million tons annually.

The Driftwood project has a price tag of some $25 billion, of which Tellurian has already spent around $1 billion, with construction at around 30% of completion, according to the corporate presentation.

Driftwood LNG will comprise five liquefaction trains, with the first phase of development to add 11 million tons of LNG annually to the U.S. total. Currently, LNG export facilities in the United States have a combined operating capacity under real-world operating conditions of 11.4 billion cubic feet daily, the EIA said in its Annual Energy Outlook 2023 last year.

There is an additional 7.3 billion cubic feet daily of capacity under construction, while a further 18.3 billion cu ft of possible LNG export capacity has received full regulatory approval from the U.S. Department of Energy and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission but has not yet received a final investment decision.

The United States became the world’s largest LNG exporter last year, leading to a global increase of 3%, Kpler reported last month. The global total stood at 412.44 million tons, of which the U.S. contributed 86.15 million tons.

By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com

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