Small to Mid-Scale LNG Plants

Linde Engineering is specialized in pre-engineered solutions tailored to individual requirements for small to mid-scale LNG plants, offering the full range of liquefaction technologies, including its most recent standardized LNG plant concept StarLNG^®.

Driven by growing global natural gas reserves, favorable gas prices and stricter emission regulations, liquefied natural gas (LNG) is beginning to replace traditional oil-based fuels in marine and heavy vehicle engines, power generation and process industries. This emerging "merchant LNG" market calls for decentralized small to mid-scale LNG plants and is now growing beyond a niche market, attracting new and low-cost players. We have been supplying individually designed LNG plants for many years. Today, those plants demonstrate the "technical" excellence of our applied LNG technology for merchant and peak-shaving LNG plants. To deliver the same levels of quality at lower cost and in shorter time frames, we decided to increase the degree of standardization in our LNG business. The result is our StarLNG plant concept.

“Small to mid-scale LNG plants do not compromise on safety, reliability, robustness and efficiency in comparison to world-scale LNG facilities, while execution risks and time as well as capital requirements are significantly lower.”

New Benchmark in Standardization

StarLNG was developed to deliver standardized, optimized small to mid-scale LNG plants featuring a wide set of process variations. This “process toolbox” is designed to cover about 90% of real-life operating conditions. It offers the following major benefits:

Same safety levels as world-scale LNG plants
Fast-track EPC execution schedule
Reduced CAPEX
Highly efficient LIMUM^® process, easy to operate
Modularized units for pre-treatment, process and main pipe racks
Toolbox concept with many options

Ease of Operations

The generic StarLNG plant concept (base case with 200 tons per day (tpd) net liquefaction capacity), offers many alternatives, with pre-engineered documents including a 3D CAD-model for a fully modularized plant – combining superb safety, reliability, ease of operations and efficiency with competitive prices and shortest execution schedule.

With some simple adjustments, however, StarLNG supports LNG capacity ranges between 100 and 3,000 tpd using the same pre-engineered plant design concept. For liquefaction, two proprietary designs (PFHE and CWHE) are available for the main cryogenic heat exchanger, depending on plant capacity and operational requirements. As part of the StarLNG family, StarLNGL™, the integrated technology for LNG and liquid natural gas (NGL) is used for NGL plants for ethane and LPG recovery.