The companies involved with an effort to make Elba Island a natural gas export facility explained their plans Tuesday night at Savannah Tech.

Poster boards set up around Eckburg Auditorium showed how the current ability to import about 40-50 ship tankers full of LNG a year will be turned around to allow Elba to export about the same amount of gas. Instead of vaporized natural gas flowing inland through pipelines, it will flow to the coast through those same pipelines and be liquefied at the Savannah River facility before being loaded onto tanker ships for export.

Liquefied natural gas, or LNG, is methane that’s supercooled, a process that shrinks its volume by a factor of 600, making it practical to ship. Plans call for six to 10 modular liquefaction systems developed by Shell to be built at Elba with LNG being produced there by 2016 at the earliest. Each of the small scale liquefaction plants measures about 35 by 75 meters. The project cost is estimated at $1 billion to $1.5 billion.

Click here to continue reading.