China Oil and Gas Pipeline Network (PipeChina) has received the 400th liquefied natural gas shipment at its Tianjin LNG import terminal.
The 2019-built 174,000-cbm LNG carrier, Pan Africa, delivered last week the milestone LNG cargo to the terminal located in the northern port city Tianjin near Beijing, according to a statement by PipeChina’s LNG terminal management unit.
Pan Asia’s AIS data provided by VesselsValue shows that the vessel, owned by Seapeak and chartered by Shell, brought the LNG cargo from Shell’s QCLNG plant in Australia.
PipeChina LNG Terminal Management said the vessel delivered 62,000 tons of LNG to the facility that now has 270,600 tons of LNG, equivalent to 390 million cubic meters of natural gas, in its tanks and is fully prepared for winter demand in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region.
Earlier this year, the Tianjin LNG terminal started supplying regasifed LNG to the grid only from land-based facilities following the departure of the 2010-built 145,130-cbm, FSRU Cape Ann, which now works in France’s Le Havre.
This unit, previously known as GDF Suez Cape Ann, started serving the Tianjin facility back in 2013 as the first FSRU in China under a sub-charter deal with CNOOC.
Since launch of operations, the Tianjin LNG terminal has received and discharged 25.6 million tons of LNG in ten years, equivalent to about 36.1 billion cubic meters of natural gas, according to PipeChina.
In March, PipeChina completed a 220,000-cbm LNG storage tank as part of the Tianjin LNG Phase II project.
The firm announced last month the launch of the second phase, increasing the regasification capacity to 41 million cbm per day, and the storage capacity to 420 million cbm.
Besides this facility, there are two more terminals in Tianjin and they include the Sinopec facility and the Beijing Gas facility.
China launched PipeChina in December 2019 to acquire pipelines and LNG import terminals from the country’s state-owned energy giants.
PipeChina LNG Terminal Management operates seven LNG receiving terminals, and is building three new LNG terminals.
