Nov 21 (Reuters) - One of three gas liquefaction trains at Freeport LNG's export plant in Texas tripped offline on Wednesday, the company told state environmental regulators in a report on Thursday.

The gas processing unit known as Train 3 tripped while operating due to an issue with a lube oil pump, causing an emissions event that lasted more than 11 hours from Wednesday evening into early Thursday morning, the company told regulators.

Freeport on Thursday declined to comment and did not detail plans for the unit's restart in its report to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

The second-largest U.S. LNG export facility has been the least reliable of all U.S. LNG plants with several outages this year.

The company has however been benefiting from its debottlenecking project in the last month and for several days in November pulled record amounts of natural gas to turn into LNG.

U.S. natural gas futures retreated after the news, halving an 8% gain that took prices to a one-year high earlier in the day.

Before news of the filing, gas traded at 11-month highs of around $15 per mmBtu at both the Dutch Title Transfer Facility benchmark in Europe and the Japan-Korea Marker benchmark in Asia on worries about Russian supplies and the coming of colder winter weather.

The U.S. price gain was partly driven by a data showing two U.S. export plants were on track to reach gas supply records. Supplies to the seven big U.S. operating plants were on track to hit an 11-month high of 14.5 billion cubic feet per day (bcfd) on Thursday, up from 14.1 bcfd on Wednesday.

The closure of one of Freeport's liquefaction trains should reduce its gas flow. Each train at the 2.1-bcfd Freeport plant is capable of turning around 0.7 bcfd of gas into LNG daily.

One billion cubic feet is enough gas to supply about five million U.S. homes for a day.

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https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/freeport-lng-liquefaction-train-texas-export-plant-shuts-2024-11-21/