Kinder Morgan’s Elba Island liquefaction facility in Georgia has shipped its first cargo of LNG since January this year.
The 174,309-cbm Maran Gas Hector departed the LNG export plant on Saturday but its destination is unknown, its AIS data showed on Monday.
Elba Island dispatched its first ever LNG export cargo in December 2019 joining a growing number of operational US liquefaction facilities.
However, the facility did not export any shipments since January as the Covid-19 coronavirus destroyed demand all over the globe pushing prices to record lows.
This plant’s first cargo in months follows the commercial in-service of the seventh train announced by Kinder Morgan on August 27.
This is the last of ten small-scale movable modular liquefaction units as the US firm did not place the units in order.
The ten units have a total capacity of about 2.5 mtpa of LNG for export, equivalent to some 350 million cubic feet per day of natural gas.
But the second unit still remains offline following a fire in a mixed refrigerant compressor earlier this year, according to Kinder Morgan.
This also prompted the operator to shut two adjacent units as a precaution that were later brought back online.
It remains unclear when Kinder Morgan will restart this unit.
Kinder Morgan owns 51 percent of Elba while EIG Global Energy Partners holds a 49 percent stake.
The nearly $2 billion project has a 20-year contract with the Hague-based LNG giant Shell.
