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The
Malaysia Liquefied Natural Gas Project is one of
Sarawak’s great success. Perhaps this is not surprising:
Sarawak is the country’s biggest natural gas producing
state, exporting mainly to Japan, but increasingly to
other markets such as Taiwan and South Korea.
 Discovery of the large
gas reserves in Central Luconia, offshore Bintulu in the
late 1970s, led to the creation of the LNG plant. To
produce liquefied natural gas, the extracted gas is
exposed to low temperatures to reduce it to 1/600th of
its original volume. This transforms it into a liquid
that can then be transported.
The capacity of the plant has grown from six million
tonnes a year to 8.1 million tonnes. It is the single
largest commercial undertaking in Malaysia and the third
largest LNG plant in the world. It is managed and
operated under a jointventure made up of Petronas,
Shell, Mitsubishi and the Sarawak state government as
equity partners.
 Due to growing
demand, a second three-train MLNG is under way. The
construction MLNG is under way. The construction of the
first of the three new liquefaction trains was scheduled
for completion by the end of 1994, with the entire
project expected to be onstream by 1997. Each train will
have a design capacity of 2.6 million tonnes, doubling
total production of LNG to 16 million tonnes.
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