By Marwa Rashad and Julia Payne

LONDON, Jan 11 (Reuters) – High U.S. fuel exporter, Freeport LNG, is anticipated to additional prolong the seven-month-long outage of its liquefied pure fuel (LNG) export plant in Texas to February, because it awaits regulatory approvals, three sources instructed Reuters on Wednesday.

Accounting for 20% of U.S. LNG exports, resumption of the ability is necessary to ease the squeeze of world LNG provides, particularly as Europe is rebuilding its fuel storage after Russia lower fuel exports following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.

“There was no official messaging, however no one expects any cargoes till end-February on the earliest,” one of many sources mentioned.

“Second half of January is now out of sight,” one other supply mentioned.

Freeport LNG spokeswoman mentioned the restart timeline nonetheless stands and the corporate was nonetheless concentrating on the second half of this month for the protected, preliminary restart of its liquefaction facility, pending regulatory approvals.

The ability was initially anticipated to restart in October, however pushed again that concentrate on a number of occasions for the reason that plant first closed on June 8 following a hearth {that a} consultants’ report decided was attributable to insufficient working and testing procedures, and human error and fatigue.

In late December, the corporate mentioned reconstruction work was considerably full however regulators have to approve the restart, including it didn’t anticipate the preliminary restart of its liquefaction facility to start till the second half of January 2023.

The delays have pressured massive prospects together with JERA and Osaka Fuel to e-book a whole bunch of thousands and thousands of {dollars} of losses. Its different massive offtakers embrace BP, TotalEnergies and SK E&S.

U.S. LNG exports have been steadily growing for years and in 2022, the USA grew to become the highest provider of LNG to Europe, the place demand soared following Moscow’s resolution to largely lower off piped fuel provide.

Each the U.S. Federal Power Regulatory Fee (FERC) and the Division of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Supplies Security Administration (PHMSA) have to approve Freeport’s return to service.

Many analysts don’t count on the plant to return till the primary or second quarter as a result of the corporate nonetheless has quite a lot of work to do to fulfill regulators.

(Reporting by Marwa Rashad and Julia Payne in London; Further reporting by Emily Chow in Singapore and Scott DiSavino in New York; Enhancing by Nina Chestney and Bernadette Baum)