Labor challenges await the next wave of North American LNG export projects.

North American LNG Export Projects Face Staffing Challenges

By Curtis Williams and Nia Williams

HOUSTON (Reuters) – A coming wave of North American liquefied natural gas (LNG) export projects faces staffing challenges that are prompting some of the biggest developers to expand training and coordinate projects to keep construction workers.

“Labor has grown as an inflationary concern for everyone in the industry. We need to actively forecast and manage labor availability and supply chain like never before,” Marsden said in an interview via email last week.

There are eight export projects now under way that when completed would add 86 million tonnes per annum (MTPA) capacity of the chilled natural gas. The projects have already created thousands of construction jobs and are soon to employ hundreds of operators.

Paul Marsden, head of Bechtel Corp’s Energy global business unit, which has built 30% of the world’s LNG plants in the last 20 years, said industry, labor and education must work together to provide the training and workers to staff all the projects.

“In the past, soaring construction costs in U.S. LNG projects hurt project economics and even led to bankruptcy for one major contractor,” said Alex Munton, a director at consultancy Rapidan Energy Group.

Bechtel is developing projects with some 27 MTPA of new capacity, including Sempra’s Port Arthur LNG project and an expansion at Cheniere Energy’s Corpus Christi plant, with an additional 29 MTPA waiting for formal approvals to move ahead.

Workers Needed

At present Bechtel has more than 3,000 professionals working on its LNG projects. At peak, the company expects the number to grow to close to 20,000 craft professionals, Marsden said.

Cheniere Energy, one of Bechtel’s largest customers and the biggest LNG exporter in the U.S., has scheduled its construction so it can move existing workers from the Corpus Christi expansion to its next project when that gets going, to ensure it does not lose workers. Two other projects – Golden Pass LNG and Plaquemines LNG – have added workers and are moving to 24-hour work schedules.

Cheniere and Bechtel are training workers using virtual simulations or via partnerships with local schools.

LNG Canada, located in Kitimat in a remote corner of British Columbia, invested more than C$5 million ($3.74 million) in training including at local colleges, the company said.

Some newer plants are employing modular and pre-built components to avoid the inflationary pressure of a stick-built plant by outsourcing some of the construction to countries with lower labor costs.

Venture Global LNG stitched together 18 liquefaction units in its highly modular Calcasieu Pass LNG plant, allowing it to open the facility in what it said was record time. But problems with the equipment have prevented it from delivering contract cargoes, the company has said. First commercial cargoes will not be available until 2024, two years after processing began.

(Reporting by Curtis Williams in Houston and Nia Williams in British Columbia; Editing by Matthew Lewis)

Facebook and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg releases new Threads app, which many say is a ‘softer’ version of rival Elon Musk’s Twitter app, but the new app faces controversy.

National Political Correspondent Neil W. McCabe interviewed pollster Doug Kaplan about his Kaplan Strategies poll showing Louisiana’s Republican Attorney General Jeff Landry with a commanding lead in his race to be the next the next Pelican State governor.

New reports allege that a top Conservative group is imploding, after it’s been revealed that the founder is aligning herself with one presidential candidate.

Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg releases his latest social media app to rival Twitter, In his feud with Elon Musk.

BENGALURU (Reuters) – Foxconn said on Monday it is pulling out of a joint venture with Vedanta Ltd that was set up…

(Reuters) -The group representing China’s auto manufacturers has retracted a pledge to avoid “abnormal pricing” that it had brokered between 16 automakers,…

LONDON (Reuters) – British online supermarket and technology group Ocado said on Monday its first robotic warehouse in Asia, built for Japanese…

By Karin Strohecker LONDON (Reuters) – Some two dozen central banks across emerging and advanced economies are expected to have digital currencies…