Italian energy group Eni said on Saturday it had launched the hull of the Nguya Floating Liquefied Natural Gas (FLNG) facility in Wison Heavy Industry's shipyard in Nantong, China, to be deployed offshore of the Republic of Congo.
The FLNG will have a liquefaction capacity of 2.4 million tons per annum (MTPA) and will complement the existing Tango FLNG, which has a capacity of 0.6 MTPA and has been operational since December 2023, ENI said in a statement.
The combination of the two will bring the total liquefaction capacity of the Congo LNG project to 3 MTPA by the end of 2025, it said.
Eni in 2022 signed a contract with China's Wison Heavy Industry to set up an FLNG unit off the Republic of Congo to increase LNG production and exports from the African country.
It is the second FLNG to be deployed in the Republic of Congo.
In February this year, Eni said that the Republic of Congo exported its first cargo of LNG to Italy, making the country an energy exporter.
"We have been the first to believe in the value of Congo's gas, primarily for domestic power generation, and then for export," Guido Brusco, Eni's chief operating officer for Global Natural Resources, said in the statement.
(Reuters - Reporting by Rishabh Jaiswal in Bengaluru; Editing by Bernadette Baum)