LNG Carriers Line Up At Malaysia's Bintulu Complex After Maintenance

A backlog of liquefied natural gas (LNG) tankers is waiting to load at Malaysia's Bintulu terminal this week after outages and maintenance work disrupted production, according to industry sources and shiptracking data.

The Bintulu facility in Sarawak, controlled by state-owned Petronas, consists of nine LNG production trains run by four different operators with total capacity of nearly 30 million metric tons per year, making it the largest LNG-exporting complex in Asia.

Petronas' MLNG joint venture completed planned maintenance on its train 7 in August, while train 4 had issues that required unplanned maintenance, two sources familiar with the matter said on Tuesday.

One of the sources said that trains 8 and 9 had also undergone unplanned maintenance in August.

All four of the affected trains are now back up, the source said, declining to be identified because they were not authorised to speak to media.

Petronas did not reply to requests for comment.

Petronas had previously requested that buyers defer some LNG loadings from its Bintulu complex due to operational issues at one production train, Reuters reported in August.

A Rystad Energy report on Friday said that trains 7 and 8 at Bintulu, operated by Petronas' Tiga joint venture, were facing issues.

"The Petronas-operated Tiga project in Bintulu, Malaysia, is ... facing reduced capacity due to upstream gas issues for train 7 and a glitch in the heat exchanger for train 8, likely resulting in delivery delays for the fourth quarter of 2024," analyst Masanori Odaka wrote.

At least seven LNG tankers were waiting to load at the Bintulu terminal as of Tuesday, with loading dates for some of them pushed back slightly, shiptracking data showed.

Kpler analyst Go Katayama said that typically there would be two to three LNG vessels waiting to load at Bintulu.

The LNG tanker Dukhan was scheduled to load on Tuesday, Kpler data showed, but the ship was still waiting off Bintulu as of Tuesday afternoon.

LSEG data on Tuesday showed that the loading dates for Dukhan and another tanker, Oceanic Breeze, were pushed back by a day to Sept. 7.

Asian spot LNG prices LNG-AS increased last week amid the production issues at Bintulu and an unplanned outage at Australia's Ichthys LNG, rising 20 cents to $14.00 per million British thermal units (mmBtu) on Friday.

(Reuters - Reporting by Florence Tan and Emily Chow; Editing by Tony Munroe and Kim Coghill)