LNG

Cheniere Energy, the operator of the now enlarged Sabine Pass plant in Louisiana with six liquefaction Trains and the Corpus Christi facility in Texas, has seen its shares rise to all-time highs and become a favoured stock for investment fund managers.

The Cheniere Energy shares, listed on the New York Stock Exchange American board, have hit a low in the past year of  $65.23 a share and have since risen to an all-time high of $121.31 per share.

The shares have the ticker LNG:US and were last at $120.25 per share.

The latest price gave the Houston, Texas-based company a market capitalization of $30.5 billion.

Cheniere, whose next LNG expansion plans are for the Corpus Christi plant in Texas, has a debt-to-equity ratio of 24.30.

The company now has 40.5 million tonnes per annum of export capacity and will take this to more than 50.5 MTPA in about four or five years.

Cheniere is now focusing on the Corpus Christi expansion, known as Stage 3 and comprising the construction of seven mid-scale liquefaction Trains adjacent to the existing facility.

Additional Trains

The mid-scale Trains will add nameplate capacity of almost 10 MTPA to the 13.5 MTPA from the three larger existing Corpus Christi Trains, each producing 4.5 MTPA.

In recent Security and Exchange Commission filings, institutional investors, among the many invested in Cheniere, have shown that some have bought more shares in the company.

Blackstone Inc., the New York-based global investment business, lifted its stake in Cheniere by 0.9 percent and now owns over 12.4M shares valued at $1.48 billion.

American Century Companies Inc. lifted its stake by 1.3 percent during the third quarter. It now owns 5.74M shares valued at around $689M.

Among foreign investors, Mitsubishi UFJ Trust & Banking Corp. of Japan, the largest bank in the world by assets, lifted its stake in Cheniere by 41.3 percent during the third quarter.

Mitsubishi UFJ now owns 2.64M shares of the energy company’s stock valued at about $316.8M.

Woodside Petroleum, the Australian LNG plant operator and international commodities company BHP, are advancing with their Scarborough gas field project to underpin the Burrup Gas Hub planned for Western Australia.

Australian LNG operator Woodside Petroleum said the resource estimates of the Scarborough gas field offshore Western Australia, set to underpin its Pluto LNG plant expansion and the Burrup Peninsula Hub, have been increased by more than 50 percent.

French energy major Total said it continued its “dynamic strategy of growth” in natural gas with its acquisition of the Mozambique LNG stake and the launch of the Arctic LNG II project even as third-quarter net income dropped 29 percent to $2.80 billion compared with $3.95Bln a year ago on lower prices.

Woodside Petroleum Chief Executive Peter Coleman told the LNG2019 conference in Shanghai that international energy majors needed to do more to demonstrate as China has already done that a lower-carbon world needs LNG.

Cheniere Energy has asked regulators to introduce feed gas and refrigerants to continue its commissioning activities for Train 5 at the Sabine Pass LNG export plant in Louisiana and to take total output to 22.5 MTPA.

Australian energy company Santos said that natural gas production at the Papua New Guinea LNG’s Hides gas conditioning plant and the Kutubu gas facilities in the PNG Highlands remained shut down as a precautionary measure, along with the liquefaction plant, following a major earthquake and a series of aftershocks.