The first commercial FSRU came online in 2005 off the coast of the Dominican Republic. Twenty years later, the technology is proven, the mooring configurations are standardized, and the supply chain for conversion vessels is deep. The technical risk in floating regasification is essentially solved.
Project failures still happen. When they do, the root causes are almost never engineering.
Three patterns that sink FSRU projects
Off-take agreements that precede grid capacity. A 500 MMSCFD terminal delivers nothing if the downstream transmission network tops out at 200. This sounds obvious. It’s routinely overlooked because the utility negotiating the off-take and the ministry permitting the grid expansion are separate institutions that do not coordinate timelines. By the time the FSU is on station, the project is three years behind its contracted sendout schedule.
Financing structures that assume sovereign credit. Development bank financing for sovereign-backed LNG projects often requires a government guarantee — a reasonable requirement in theory. In practice, government guarantee issuance operates on political timelines that have nothing to do with construction milestones. Projects in Bangladesh, Pakistan, and several West African markets have experienced 12–24 month delays at this stage specifically.
EPC scope creep between the feasibility study and the FEED. A feasibility study scoped for a Gas Port mooring configuration gets handed to an EPC contractor who proposes a Gateway mooring to accommodate larger vessels. The change is technically sound. The cost delta — typically 15–20% — breaks the project economics at the tariff rate negotiated against the feasibility estimate. No one goes back to renegotiate the tariff. The project stalls.
What the track record shows
The International Gas Union’s 2024 World LNG Report documented 22 FSRU projects in advanced development or construction across South and Southeast Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and South America. Of the projects that slipped more than 18 months from their original commissioning date, the report attributed primary delays to grid infrastructure misalignment (41%), financing structure issues (35%), and scope changes between studies (24%).
Engineering delays accounted for less than 8% of total schedule slippage across the sample.
The implication for project developers
The feasibility phase is not just a technical exercise. It is the moment to map the institutional dependencies — the grid authority’s capital program, the ministry’s guarantee workflow, the tariff regulator’s pricing model — against the project timeline. If those dependencies are not stress-tested at feasibility, they surface during FEED or financial close, when fixing them costs orders of magnitude more.
Developers who treat feasibility as a checkbox before the “real work” begins are building the conditions for those 18-month slippages themselves.