U.S. regulators seek more answers from Freeport LNG to weigh restart request

(Reuters) -U.S. regulators sent another list of questions to Freeport LNG on Monday as they evaluated its request to restart full commercial operations of its export facility in Texas.

Last month, the privately held LNG export facility, the second-biggest in the U.S., started to exit an eight-month outage that was caused by a fire in June 2022.

Freeport requested authorization from regulators late last month to progress to full commercial operations on the last of its three gas-liquefaction units, after the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) gave approval for partial restart of the other two of those units.

FERC and the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) sought answers on operating conditions and steps taken to improve safety.

“In collaboration with the regulatory agencies, we are continuing to progress the safe restart of our liquefaction facility,” a Freeport spokesperson said in an email. The company had no comment on FERC’s data request.

The FERC request asked for “a status update on Freeport LNG’s hiring efforts to address operator fatigue and training status of the new hires,” according to its letter to Freeport.

The fiery blast that knocked the facility offline in June resulted from inadequate operating and testing procedures, operator fatigue and other shortcomings, a review found.

(Reporting by Deep Vakil and Kavya Guduru in Bengaluru; Editing by Richard Chang and Bradley Perrett)