Planning Annual LNG Deliveries with Transshipment

Mingyu Li,Peter Schütz

doi:10.3390/en13061490

Abstract

The introduction of transshipment ports in the liquefied natural gas (LNG) supply chain in recent years offers additional flexibility, but also challenges to the planning of the annual delivery program. We present a new variant of the LNG-annual delivery program (ADP) planning problem by considering transshipment as well as time-dependent sailing times. We present a continuous time formulation for the LNG-ADP problem and propose a rolling horizon heuristic to solve the problem. Both the model and heuristic were used to solve a case inspired by the Yamal LNG project. The computational results show that the heuristic provides good solutions within a relatively short amount of time, especially compared to the exact solution methods. However, there is a trade-off between computational time and solution quality when designing the rolling horizon heuristic. The results also show the impact storage capacity at the transshipment port has on the total cost.

Highlights

The recent years have witnessed an increasing demand for natural gas
We present a liquefied natural gas (LNG)-annual delivery program (ADP) problem inspired by the Yamal LNG project located on the Yamal peninsula in Northern Russia
For each instance we provide the objective function value of the best solution found by the rolling horizon heuristic (RHH), the best bound and gap reported from the last iteration of the RHH, the number of iterations that have been solved and how many of them did not solve to optimality as well as the run time for the RHH

Summary

Introduction

The recent years have witnessed an increasing demand for natural gas. This is partly due to natural gas being considered a cleaner source of energy when compared to other fossil fuels. Asian countries such as China, India, and South Korea are expected to further increase their consumption of natural gas [1]. The major natural gas producers are Russia, Iran, Qatar and the US. For such long distances between the major producers and customers that cross continents, it is more economic and efficient to liquefy the natural gas and transport it with specialized liquefied natural gas (LNG). According to [2], the global LNG imports have been increasing since 2013, reaching 313.8

Methods

Results

Conclusion