Eight days after a fire crippled one of the country’s two floating liquefied natural gas import terminals, the state agency responsible for overseeing LNG infrastructure is still unable to explain what caused the accident.
Petrobangla – the oil, gas and mineral corporation – says it lacks the technical expertise and specialised personnel needed to determine the root cause of the most serious disruption to an LNG terminal since commercial operations began in 2018.
The incident has exposed a critical institutional gap in the oversight of floating storage and regasification units, or FSRUs, which have become indispensable to meeting Bangladesh’s growing demand for natural gas.
“The organisation does not have the technical capability to determine the root cause of the accident on its own,” Petrobangla Director for Operations Rafiqul Islam told TIMES of Bangladesh.
The admission comes as Bangladesh experiences the first prolonged shutdown of an offshore LNG import terminal since its first floating terminal was commissioned in 2018.
The outage has removed an estimated 450 million to 500 million cubic feet of gas a day from the national grid, cutting the country’s LNG supply by nearly half and disrupting power generation, industrial production, commercial activity and household gas supplies nationwide.
The accident occurred around midday on 21 July at the Moheshkhali FSRU, one of the country’s two floating LNG import terminals.
According to Petrobangla and Rupantarita Prakritik Gas Company Limited, the incident occurred while the FSRU was receiving LNG from a tanker during a ship-to-ship transfer operation.
A technical malfunction was followed by a fire inside the terminal, forcing operators to suspend regasification immediately and shut down the facility as a safety precaution.
Officials have not disclosed which equipment failed or the full extent of the damage. However, sources familiar with the repair work said critical equipment linked to the terminal’s regasification system had been damaged and needed to be replaced.
The prolonged shutdown has shifted the government’s immediate focus from determining the cause to restoring gas supplies.
Foreign experts lead recovery
Since the accident, the terminal’s operator, US-based Excelerate Energy, has been working around the clock to restore operations with support from Petrobangla and RPGCL.
Specialist engineers from the United Kingdom, Romania and Singapore have been deployed to the Moheshkhali terminal, while replacement equipment, critical spare parts and specialised machinery have been flown into Bangladesh to accelerate repairs.
Officials said the decision to airlift heavy and high-value components, rather than wait for sea shipment, reflected the urgency of bringing the terminal back online as the outage continued to strain electricity generation, industrial production and gas supplies for millions of consumers.
RPGCL General Manager Muhammad Nasir Uddin said restoration work was progressing under the supervision of international specialists.
Petrobangla Chairman Md Abdul Mannan told TIMES that the organisation was closely monitoring the repairs. Around 20 engineers, most of them foreign specialists, are currently stationed at the terminal, he said.
The reliance on overseas expertise extends beyond the repair work. While foreign engineers work to restore the damaged facility, Petrobangla acknowledges that it lacks the in-house capacity to determine independently why the accident occurred.
Investigation outside the regulator
Rather than leading the technical inquiry into the country’s most serious LNG terminal disruption since commercial operations began, Petrobangla has left the investigation to a committee formed by the Ministry of Power, Energy and Mineral Resources.
The committee is headed by Joint Secretary AKM Fazlul Haque.
However, the ministry has disclosed neither the committee’s terms of reference nor a deadline for submitting its findings. Contacted by TIMES, Fazlul Haque declined to comment on the committee’s mandate, methodology or scope of work.
The absence of an immediate technical investigation led by the country’s principal LNG oversight agency has raised broader questions about institutional preparedness and regulatory capability.
As Bangladesh becomes increasingly dependent on imported LNG, energy experts say identifying the root cause of the Moheshkhali accident is critical not only to restoring the damaged terminal but also to preventing similar failures across the country’s LNG infrastructure.
The accident has therefore exposed more than a temporary disruption to gas supplies. It has revealed a deeper vulnerability: Bangladesh has built critical LNG import infrastructure, but its principal oversight agency still lacks the technical capacity to investigate independently when that infrastructure fails.
