A number of environmental challenges had to be addressed for Bangladesh’s FSRU-based LNG receiving terminal, leading to some design innovations
A number of environmental challenges had to be addressed for Bangladesh’s FSRU-based LNG receiving terminal, leading to some design innovations
Bangladesh became a first-time importer of LNG last year, receiving 0.67M tonnes. To quickly ramp up its regas capacity, Bangladesh added two floating storage and regasification units (FSRUs), both of which started to supply natural gas to the country’s grid this year.
In April, Summit LNG FSRU, with a regasification capacity of 3.75 mta, was commissioned at the Summit LNG Terminal located offshore Moheshkhali Island in the Bay of Bengal.
Bangladesh’s first LNG import terminal, Moheshkhali LNG, began operation in January utilising the Excelerate FSRU Excellence, with a regas capacity of 3.75 mta and storage capacity of 138,000 m3.
In total, the two FSRUs are currently adding about 650M ft3 of LNG daily to the national grid, according to a budgetary speech to Bangladesh parliament’s by national minister of finance A H M Mustafa Kamal in June.
On 20 April Summit LNG FSRU arrived at Moheshkhali, Cox’s Bazar, initially loaded with 138,000 m3 of LNG from Qatar. It began supplying its first natural gas via subsea pipeline to the national grid on 29 April. The first ship-to-ship (STS) transfer of liquefied gas from LNG carrier to the FSRU was completed during the second half of May.
Owned by a consortium of Singapore’s Summit Corp and Japan’s Mitsubishi Corp, Summit LNG Terminal Co Ltd (SLNG) signed a 15-year charter agreement with US-based Excelerate Energy for the FSRU Summit LNG in August 2017. Excelerate also agreed to act as the owner’s engineer for Summit in regard to the fixed infrastructure components of the terminal, which include a subsea plug, mooring system and subsea pipeline.
A consortium of MacGregor and Geocean received an engineering, procurement, construction and installation (EPCI) contract for the complete mooring, riser and pipeline system for the FSRU, including offshore PLEM (pipeline end manifold), pipeline to shore and onshore PLEM.
Design innovations
As Bangladesh is a delta nation, it can face challenging weather conditions from monsoon rains, cyclones or typhoons, considerations that had to be taken into account when designing and building the offshore terminal. Key design drivers for the project were:
This led to a number of innovative solutions:
The MacGregor equipment supplied for the Summit LNG project was delivered to the mobilisation base in the Port of Jurong in Singapore during the first week of October 2018. The turret, suction anchors, landing pad, riser, tether gravity anchor and buoy for riser, umbilical, polyester lines, mooring chains, mooring line connecting links as well as the PLEM from Geocean arrived on vessels from China, Europe and Malaysia.
After a short period of storage at the mobilisation base, all of the equipment was loaded on to barges and transported to Bangladesh for the completion of the offshore installation in February 2019. The FSRU arrived on site in April and was connected to the turret on 22 April, with testing of the systems and connection to the stern-mooring system thereafter.
The MacGregor equipment for the FSRU terminal includes stern-mooring equipment and mooring connectors. MacGregor is the project manager for the fabrication and procurement, and project manager for the complete subsea mooring and riser system. CAN Systems is responsible for the design of the mooring and riser system.
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