(Adds Freeport statement)
March 6 (Reuters) - U.S. regulators sent another list of
questions to Freeport LNG on Monday as they evaluated its
request to restart full commercial operations of its export
facility in Texas.
Last month, the privately held LNG export facility, the
second-biggest in the U.S., started to exit an eight-month
outage that was caused by a fire in June 2022.
Freeport requested authorization from regulators late last
month to progress to full commercial operations on the last of
its three gas-liquefaction units, after the Federal Energy
Regulatory Commission (FERC) gave approval for partial restart
of the other two of those units.
FERC and the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety
Administration (PHMSA) sought answers on operating conditions
and steps taken to improve safety.
"In collaboration with the regulatory agencies, we are
continuing to progress the safe restart of our liquefaction
facility," a Freeport spokesperson said in an email. The company
had no comment on FERC's data request.
The FERC request asked for "a status update on Freeport
LNG's hiring efforts to address operator fatigue and training
status of the new hires," according to its letter to Freeport.
The fiery blast that knocked the facility offline in June
resulted from inadequate operating and testing procedures,
operator fatigue and other shortcomings, a review found.
(Reporting by Deep Vakil and Kavya Guduru in Bengaluru; Editing
by Richard Chang and Bradley Perrett)
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