With potential ramification for long-haul trucking, railroad, marine and oilfield applications, small-scale liquefied natural gas (LNG) fueling technology, dubbed “LNG In a Box” was unveiled Wednesday by General Electric (GE) unit GE Oil & Gas. The initial models are to be deployed in Europe under a deal with Luxembourg-based Gasfin.

Ultimately, the units are to be sold in the United States, but a GE spokesperson told NGI that there is currently no timeline as to when. “If a customer ordered one of the units today, we are telling them it would be 12 months before delivery, and we hope to get that down to six months in the future.”

The new unit is the smallest of GE’s LNG production equipment options, with the largest being full-blown liquefaction project equipment in Australia and the medium a micro LNG plant introduced last year for fueling LNG tanker trucks that deliver supplies to retail outlets. The small units can produce 10,000-50,000 gallons/day of LNG. A typical 10,000 gallon/day fueling operation could service up to a 100 trucks, according to GE.

The latest offering could be transported to different locations, which means they could go to highway-based truck fueling stops or deployed at wellsites to avoid flaring gas for various transportation and energy uses in the oilfields. They also could be fueling sources for barge and rail systems that run on LNG.

“It is the size of about one-and-a-half tractor-trailer containers,” said the spokesperson at the LNG 17 conference in Houston. It’s built to be “redeployable,” but it is not something “you can literally put down one day and move down the road the next.”

A principal focus will be use in long-haul trucking in Europe, North America and eventually China, the spokesperson said. However, it will have the other applications where there is a need for LNG.

“It might be used in an area where there is flared gas, where you want to capture it and modify it and sell off that flare gas. You wouldn’t want to build a big LNG production plant, you need something small that can capture the gas, liquefy it and sell it.”

Gasfin, a European-based LNG company, signed a memorandum of understanding with GE on Wednesday to install five of the LNG units to serve clusters of fueling stations already in place. An initial unit was installed near the border of Italy and Slovenia, and there is the potential for deploying another 25 units in Europe, according to GE.

©Copyright 2013Intelligence Press Inc. All rights reserved. The preceding news reportmay not be republished or redistributed, in whole or in part, in anyform, without prior written consent of Intelligence Press, Inc.