Every few days, a 900-foot long tanker sails from Cheniere Energy’s mammoth Sabine Pass terminal near Lake Charles, loaded with natural gas for destinations around the world.
Everything about the operation is oversized, The New York Times reports.
The terminal straddles 1,000 acres on the Texas-Louisiana border and cost about $18 billion to build. Each shipment contains enough liquefied natural gas, or LNG, to heat 45,000 homes for a year.
“This is a generational opportunity for us,” says Cheniere Chief Financial Officer Michael Wortley. “We’re not talking about the next couple of years, we’re talking about the next 50 years.”
Sabine Pass had originally been designed as an LNG import terminal, but with domestic prices falling and overseas demand rising a decade ago, executives realized the natural gas needed to go out, not come in.
“We thought that if we’re going to make this thing work, we’re going to have to go all in and literally turn the plant around,” Wortley says.
