Toshiba Sets up US LNG Unit

Japanese Toshiba is forming a US operating company, Toshiba America LNG Corporation (TAL), to focus on the LNG market, it said August 4. It's understood the Houston-based unit has been in gestation for at least four months.

It will be "responsible for co-ordinating and assembling the necessary infrastructure chain to produce US LNG which can then be marketed by the broader Toshiba group to key focus geographies such as Latin America, the Caribbean and Asia. To facilitate this role, TAL will be one of five tolling customers at the Freeport LNG project in Quintana, Texas," said Toshiba.

Toshiba has also entered into a pipeline capacity agreement with an affiliate of Canada's Enbridge to bring US gas to Freeport LNG facility and with Gulf LNG for tug services: "Over the coming months and years, TAL will be entering into additional arrangements to facilitate the delivery of US LNG."

The Japanese conglomerate said that, over the past two decades, natural gas has emerged as a primary fuel for its global business, driven by concerns around greenhouse gas emissions and the desire for high conversion efficiency in power generation: "LNG allows access to this sector in areas across the world which are unreachable by pipeline."

It announced three key appointments to TAL: Takayuki Shibano as CEO, a nuclear engineering graduate who joined the group in 1987 and has spent most of his career in energy operations, including most recently as a senior vice-president of Toshiba's nuclear subsidiary Westinghouse; Cheryl Roberts as CFO with 25 years in the energy sector; and Veldanda (V.V.) Rao as its COO who has over 30 years of commercial and technical experience in LNG, gas and power, including at BP and consultancy Galway Group.

Rao's LinkedIn page showed he joined Houston-based TAL in April 2017.

Mark Smedley