LNG

Halliburton, the largest energy services company in the US and a key LNG contractor, will release details in the next couple of weeks about the future of its KBR business.

The company is likely to announce that some parts of the business will be sold off and a separate company is expected to emerge from the engineering and construction unit that could be worth as much as $6 billion.

Halliburton is pushing forward with a plan muted since 2004 to sell KBR to investors as a separate company. It will start the process with a sale to investors in about six months’ time of 20 percent of KBR in an initial public offering.

Harald Dany, Atlas Copco Gas & Process, Cologne, Germany

One of the challenging aspects of transporting liquefied natural gas to the growing world market is finding the most efficient way to handle boil-off gas during the carrier’s voyage.

Many LNG carriers have employed steam-turbine propulsion systems fuelled by boil-off. Outside of the area of steam-based propulsion, there is no efficient use of the gas.

At the same time, the good, old steam propulsion has been losing popularity and could actually become “a thing of the past”, some experts have suggested.