The Methane Spirit, loaded with a 160,000 cubic meter cargo from the Australia Pacific LNG project, docked at the terminal on April 19, marking the official start of commercial operations of the first phase of the project.

In the first phase, the plant has a nameplate capacity of 3 million mt/year of LNG that can meet the demand of 22 million households in Guangxi and the western part of the neighboring Guangdong province.

This phase has been delayed by close to a year. The plant had been scheduled to start commercial operations in mid-2015.

Sinopec had earlier stated that the second phase of the project would see the terminal capacity increase to 9 million mt/year.

However, Sinopec has not stated a timeline for the second phase. There were no replies to requests for clarification on the status of phase 2 of the project.

Most of the supply for the terminal will come from Australia, where Sinopec has already signed a 20-year sale and purchase agreement with APLNG for 7.6 million mt/year of LNG.

As the 3 million mt/year terminal import capacity is currently well below the contracted volumes, Sinopec recently sold some of its term volumes to other buyers in the spot market.

In the future, some contracted volumes would go to Sinopec’s existing LNG terminal in Qingdao, but given the size of the contract, more volumes would most likely be sold, a source close to the company said.

The arrival of the first commercial cargo comes two weeks after the ship delivering the commissioning cargo to the facility left.

The BW Pavilion Vanda, which also carried a cargo from the APLNG project, arrived at the Beihai plant on March 28, and left on April 5, cFlow Platts ship-tracking software, showed.

Sources said that the commissioning process had gone smoothly.