(30c) Recent Development in Natural Gas Liquefaction Technology

The LNG industry is an ever-changing industry where we face new challenges and solve new problems every day. The shale gas boom, the search of off-shore natural gas resources, the use of LNG as transportation fuel, and the liquefaction process to be carried out in arctic area, are few examples of changes the industry is experiencing.  These changes bring new challenges to modern LNG projects, because the design conditions, such as feed gas composition and variability, ocean motion and equipment movement, extreme ambient temperatures, are very different from and outside the experience of conventional LNG plants that were built many years ago.  In this paper, we provide an overview of recent liquefaction technology development and discuss how these new challenges are addressed.