A research project heavily sponsored by the US Department of Energy is investigating the feasibility of offloading LNG directly from carrier through the high-pressure Bishop heat exchange process and then injecting the resulting "dense-phase" gas into caverns formed in underground salt domes.
Once there, the natural gas can be delivered straight into the pipeline distribution grid as necessary.
The project is headed up by Houston-based Conversion Gas Import (CGI) and now has close to 30 participants, involving both operators and contractors offering different variants for various elements in the system.
Early
