Venture Global Ready for Official Launch of Calcasieu Pass LNG

After years of selling liquefied natural gas on the spot market, Venture Global’s Calcasieu Pass LNG plant is ready to begin operation officially, according to a filing the company made with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Per the filing, “Calcasieu Pass believes it has filed all requireddocumentation demonstrating readiness to commence service ofthe remainder of the facility,” Venture Global said, as quoted by Reuters. Plans are to launch the plant at capacity by April 15.The Calcasieu Pass facility, which started producing in 2022, has a capacity of 10 million tons of liquefied gas annually.

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What this means is that Venture Global’s long-term buyers may finally start getting the cargos that Venture Global until now sold on the spot market, prompting these buyers to turn to the courts, accusing the company of deliberately not completing the facility officially in order to avoid fulfilling its contractual obligations to make more money on said spot market.

The long-term buyers include Shell, BP, and Spain’s Repsol. Shell last year alleged that Venture Global had wrongfully earned $3.5 billion from selling cargos from long-term contracts on the spot market and that this had caused serious LNG sourcing difficulties for one company that had to resort to sourcing the gas from five other U.S. producer, incurring additional costs of $1.5 billion.

The way Venture Global did all this was by using a loophole that stipulated it could trade its product on the spot market before the production facility was completed. In view of keeping the spot market business going, Venture Global has been delaying the official completion of the Calcasieu Pass for as long as it has been able to. It seems the time has come to go official. In the meantime, another energy major has refused to join the client list of the company.

TotalEnergies passed on the opportunity to sign up for long-term liquefied natural gas from Venture Global because it did not trust the company, the French supermajor’s chief executive told Reuters last month. “I don’t want to deal with these guys, because of what they are doing. … I don’t want to be in the middle of a dispute with my friends, with Shell and BP,” Patrick Pouyanne told the publication.

By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com

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