Malaysia: Air Products Wins Petronas FLNG Gig

Air Products’ global leading liquefied natural gas technology and equipment will be floating on an LNG production platform 180 kilometers off the coast of Malaysia and producing 1.2 million tons per year of LNG when the PETRONAS Floating LNG Project 1 comes onstream in late 2015.

Air Products announced the signing of an equipment and process license agreement with PETRONAS Floating LNG 1 Ltd., a wholly owned subsidiary of Petroliam Nasional Berhad, the national oil and gas company of Malaysia.

“This project will showcase not only our proprietary and leading LNG technology and equipment, but also Air Products’ worldwide manufacturing capabilities, as portions of the equipment will be fabricated and assembled in the United States and Asia,” said Bill Kennington, major account manager‒LNG with Air Products. “This floating LNG (FLNG) project is very important for Malaysia by unlocking and enabling economic development and commercialization of significant gas reserves from locations where the resource was essentially stranded.”

PFLNG 1, to be located off the coast of Bintulu, Sarawak, Malaysia, will use Air Products’ AP-NTM LNG Process and Equipment. This proprietary equipment includes coil wound heat exchangers to be built in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, United States (U.S.); compressor-expanders to be assembled in Fogelsville, Pennsylvania, U.S.; and economizer cold boxes to be built in Tanjung Langsat, Malaysia. The proprietary equipment will be shipped from these three Air Products manufacturing facilities for assembly into modules and then installed on the PFLNG 1 vessel.

The AP-NTM LNG process is the most efficient of all nitrogen recycle LNG processes in the industry, and is ideally suited for small scale FLNG applications. This is the initial use of the AP-NTM LNG Process and Equipment, but its development builds on the successful implementation of the nitrogen recycle section of Air Products’ AP-X® LNG Process and Equipment, which has been operating reliably for over three years in Qatar. The AP-NTM LNG process and equipment can be configured in an all-nitrogen recycle process for a single train at a nominal one million tons per annum, or it can be boosted in capacity with the addition of pre-cooling.

Air Products has a long relationship with PETRONAS, supplying LNG technology and equipment to their land-based Bintulu, Malaysia LNG facility for multiple LNG trains, with the first train becoming operational in 1983. “We are extremely proud that PETRONAS selected Air Products’ technology for its first FLNG project. PETRONAS is a major player in LNG industry development worldwide, and we look forward to supporting them in making this FLNG project a great success,” said Jim Solomon, director‒LNG with Air Products.

This will be the second FLNG project using Air Products’ LNG technology and equipment that has been contractually awarded and joins a separate project slated for the Browse Basin off the northwest coast of Western Australia.

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LNG World News Staff, July 19, 2012; Image: Petronas