Regasification

Think of an ice cube left out on a counter, it eventually returns to being water simply through exposure to warmth. Regasification works on the same basic principle, just at industrial scale and with a far colder starting point, warming liquefied natural gas back into its normal gaseous state.

At an LNG terminal, the super cooled liquid is passed through heat exchangers, often using seawater or ambient air as the warming medium, until it returns to gas form at close to normal temperature and pressure. Only then can it be injected into the pipeline network and delivered onward to city gas distributors, power plants and industrial users.

Regasification capacity, not just storage capacity, is what actually determines how quickly an LNG terminal can turn an arriving shipload into usable pipeline gas, which is why terminal expansions are usually announced in terms of regasification capacity per year rather than storage tank size alone.