State-owned LNG producer Qatargas said it has delivered the first cargo of the fuel on a Q-Max carrier to Sinopec’s Tianjin receiving terminal in China.
The Nakilat-owned and Qatargas-chartered 266,000-cbm Al Mafyar previously loaded the cargo at Ras Laffan on October 21. The LNG carrier arrived in the northern port city of Tianjin, near Beijing, on November 10.
This marked the first cargo discharge operation to the Tianjin terminal involving a Q-Max carrier, the largest LNG vessel class in the world.
The Sinopec-owned terminal has a capacity of six mtpa but the state-owned enterprise is expanding the facility to handle up to 10.8 mtpa by 2022.
Worth mentioning here, the Tianjin facility received its first LNG cargo in February 2018 and has received more than 200 LNG cargoes so far. Al Mafyar’s arrival also marked the 100th LNG vessel to call at the terminal in 2020.
Currently, China has a total of 22 LNG receiving terminals, including 3 small-scale terminals, eleven of which can accommodate Q-Max LNG vessels, according to Qatargas.
Furthermore, the unit of energy giant Qatar Petroleum has to date delivered LNG cargoes to 13 terminals in China.
Qatargas supplied the first LNG cargo to China in September 2009, and since then it delivered more than 62 million tonnes of LNG in total.
