Ras Laffan Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) Co., the joint venture of the Qatar national petroleum company and ExxonMobil Corp., shipped its first LNG cargo to South America with a spot sale to Chile’s BG LNG Trading LLC, according to press reports.

Meanwhile, Sempra Energy’s new Cameron, LA, LNG receiving facility still awaits its first of 10 spot shipments from Qatar under a short-term deal inked earlier this year. On an earnings conference call last Monday, Sempra’s senior officials said they were unconcerned at this point about the lack of shipments to North America (see Daily GPI, Nov. 11).

In confirming that no shipments came into Cameron during the third quarter, Sempra COO Neal Schmale reiterated that they would be coming through over the course of the agreement with Qatar that runs through next year. “Over the course of the [18-month deal] we would fully expect to have volumes into Cameron, but in terms of discussing the near-term potential [for shipments] obviously for contractual reasons, we can’t talk about exactly what is going on at any particular point in time,” Schmale told financial analysts.

Quoting a RasGas official who said South America is a growing LNG market, Bloomberg reported that a cargo loaded in mid-October in Qatar had arrived at Quintero Bay in Chile.

The prospects for a global gas glut are increasing as North America’s gas shale producers grow output, according to an International Energy Agency report (see Daily GPI, Nov. 11).

Among the 56 LNG shipments under short-term contracts coming to U.S.-based terminals in the first nine months this year, none came from Qatar, and most (34) came from Trinidad. There were only three other sources of the shipments to the United States, according to the latest National Import/Export Report from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE): Egypt, Norway and Nigeria.

Among 80 LNG shipments under long-term contracts, the same four nations were the sources of the supplies. In addition, another nine shipments, all from Trinidad, were made to the electric utility in Puerto Rico through September, according to the DOE report.

Qatar officials said in the Bloomberg report their nation plans to increase its LNG production capacity from 54 to 77 million tons per year by next year, and that it recently diverted 5 million tons of supplies to China from the United States at the opening of the new RasGas production unit in October.

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