“I can confirm that planned maintenance is underway at SPL,” a spokesman for Cheniere told LNG Prime on Monday.
He declined to comment on the scope and duration of the maintenance.
Cheniere’s management said during the recent earnings call that the company plans major maintenance on Trains 3 and 4 at the Sabine Pass facility this year.
According to a note posted on Cheniere’s website, its unit Cheniere Creole Trail Pipeline started maintenance at the Gillis compressor station on May 31.
The outage is expected to last 22 days and is scheduled to end on June 22.
The Creole Trail pipeline is a bidirectional, 94-mile, 42-inch pipeline that connects the Sabine Pass LNG facility with several large interstate pipelines. It has a capacity of about 1.5 Bcf/d.
Cheniere’s Sabine Pass facility is the largest operational LNG export plant in the US.
It currently has a capacity of about 30 mtpa following the launch of the sixth train in February 2022.
Cheneire also plans to further expand the giant LNG plant.
In December 2023, Cheniere said it plans to build two instead of three liquefaction trains as part of the Sabine Pass Stage 5 expansion project with an optimized unit/cost footprint.
The project includes two large-scale liquefaction trains, each with a nameplate capacity of about 7 mtpa and a maximum production capacity of about 8.43 mtpa.
Including debottlenecking, the expansion will add up to 20 mtpa capacity to the liquefaction plant.
Cheniere plans to make a final investment decision to expand its Sabine Pass LNG plant in Louisiana in late 2026 or 2027, according to its management.
