Cedar LNG — Floating LNG Export Terminal, Kitimat

Cedar LNG has reached major construction milestones on both its marine terminal and its floating liquefied natural gas facility near Kitimat, British Columbia. The roughly $4 billion project is a 50/50 partnership between the Haisla Nation and Pembina Pipeline, and it stands as the world’s first Indigenous majority-owned LNG development and Canada’s first floating LNG export operation.

Project Scope
Rather than build a sprawling onshore liquefaction plant, Cedar LNG uses a moored floating production, storage, and offloading vessel with about 3.3 million tonnes a year of capacity. A Samsung Heavy Industries and Black & Veatch consortium is fabricating the FLNG unit in South Korea; it will be towed to a berth in the Douglas Channel and connected to a marine terminal and gas supply infrastructure onshore. The design leans on British Columbia hydropower to run the liquefaction trains, which cuts the facility’s operating emissions well below a conventional gas-fired plant.

Why It Matters
The ownership structure is the story as much as the engineering. A First Nation holds the controlling stake, which flips the usual script where Indigenous communities host energy projects without owning them. The floating approach also matters: fabricating the plant in a shipyard and towing it in compresses the schedule and sidesteps some of the labor and site constraints that have blown up onshore Kitimat budgets. If Cedar delivers on cost and emissions, the model gives other coastal projects a template that’s faster to build and easier to defend.

Project Team & Details