Is it true that 20 LNG plants have recently burned down in the US?

In January 2023, reports appeared on the Internet that about two dozen enterprises producing liquefied natural gas (LNG) had been destroyed in America over the past few months under mysterious circumstances. We have verified the accuracy of such publications.

At the very end of January, numerous Telegram channels reported that “over the past few months, under mysterious circumstances,” 20 LNG plants in the United States burned down. In total, judging by the TGStat service, there were more than 300 such channels, among the largest of them “Truthfulness"(1.49 million subscribers at the time of writing this analysis), "Russia now" (1.37 million), "🔥 Army 🅉 18+ 🔥" (1.05 million), "Bullet"(877,000), "I'm aware" (578,000), "Harder"(572,000), "Polite people 🅉 SVO"(523,000), "Breaking news!"(494,000), "Sheikh Tamir"(411,000), "⚡️🇷🇺 Reports of the Novorossiya militia Z.O.V. (DPR, LPR, Ukraine, war)"(291,000), "Reporter Rudenko V🇷🇺" (277,000) and "Yakov Kedmi"(194,000). Similar publications appeared at the same time in Facebook, Twitter, "VKontakte", YouTube, LiveJournal and on other platforms.

Posts of similar content began to appear in Russian-language social networks since July 2022. Then, however, they were talking not about 20, but about 18 factories - a video dedicated to the “mysterious” fires at American enterprises on the YouTube channel “Train of Thoughts” collected more than 1 million views. Publications on this topic were also published on popular blog platforms like “Zena" And forums.

The vast majority of January publications reporting massive fires at American gas plants used a 13-second aerial video as evidence. The video footage shows a large object burning in the middle of a residential area. This is really a plant, but not for the production of LNG, but for the processing of cardboard. It is located on the outskirts of San Diego, and shortly before the viral posts appeared in Telegram channels, the Mexican media was actively used in the news about this event fast Twitter user who managed to film the fire while landing at the airport in the border city of Tijuana.

Even if it is not the LNG plant that is burning in the video, and no other evidence is provided in the Telegram channels, can the statement about 20 burned enterprises be true? Let's check how many LNG plants there are in the USA. On the website of the Energy Information Agency of the US Department of Energy available table listing all industrial-scale LNG plants operating and under construction. According to this data, there are only seven of them in the United States, with the seventh launched in December 2022. If you count not the factories, but the production lines at them, then there will be 26 by December and 44 after December 2022 (two of the seven factories were built using a large number of small-tonnage units, one of them has 18 such devices, the other - 10).

Judging by graphics LNG exports from the United States from the same government website, in the summer there was an approximately 15 percent drop in LNG exports (and the overwhelming share of LNG volumes is exported). Taking into account what gas prices were during this period (three times higherthan the year before), this reduction was most likely due to the inability to supply. And indeed, on June 8 at the largest American plant Freeport LNG happened fire, reduced operating capacity of the US LNG industry by 17%. Since then, as we can see from the shipment schedule, there have been no significant reductions, from which we can conclude that there have been no problems, much less explosions or fires, at the remaining operating American LNG plants.

Typically, Internet users talking about the “epidemic” of fires in American factories do not name any specific enterprise affected. A rare exception is publications six months ago (including in government “Rossiyskaya newspaper"), where they talked about a fire in Oklahoma. The LNG plant in the city of Medford does not appear in the US Department of Energy table, but the production facility referred to in this news exists and the fire at it is real was in July 2022.

The point is (and this is a fairly common confusion) that you should distinguish two different substances called in English LNG (Liquified Natural Gas) and LPG (Liquified Petroleum Gas). The first is methane (CH₄), gas that comes from main pipelines, is used in power plants, is extracted from Yamal fields and until recently was sold to Europe in tens of billions of cubic meters. To liquefy, methane must be cooled to a temperature of –160 °C. It is produced in tens of millions of tons at those same seven factories. And the second, LPG, is a chemically different substance, a mixture of propane (C₃H₈) and butane (C₄H₁₀). It is usually produced as associated gas that comes out of the ground along with oil. To turn it into a liquid, LPG must be compressed by several atmospheres at room temperature. This is a gas that comes in gas lighters, cylinders for camping burners and for country stoves. Correctly in Russian, this mixture is called “liquefied hydrocarbon gases” (LPG).

The separation of such gas is a standard operation in the preparation of oil, gas and condensate for further transportation, and there are installations for this in many places, such plants in the USA about 500. These are quite explosive gases - when methane, which is lighter than air, leaks, it escapes into the atmosphere, and heavier propane and butane sit near the ground until they accumulate enough to ignite from a random spark, so fires in such factories are quite frequent. In Oklahoma, just such a plant burned down.

Thus, viral publications about 20 LNG production plants that have recently burned down in the United States are not only not confirmed by any authoritative sources, but in principle cannot be true - there are only seven such enterprises in the United States. In January publications on this topic, a video was used as “evidence” that captured a fire at a cardboard processing plant, not a gas liquefaction plant. Earlier reports talked about plants producing not LNG, but LPG - there are about 500 such plants in the United States, and fires do occur at them from time to time.

Cover photo: Pixabay

Not true

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