LNG Canada says it remains committed to delivering its first liquefied natural gas shipments in the middle of the decade despite setbacks from the coronavirus pandemic.

The $18-billion project will liquefy natural gas from northeast B.C. in a plant at Kitimat in northwest B.C., where it will be loaded onto ships and transported to Asian markets.

It is the only project that moved ahead to the construction phase among several that had been proposed in B.C. to tap into growing demand for energy in Asia and diversify from reliance on export to the U.S.

The major players backing the project include Shell, Malaysian state-owned Petronas, state-owned PetroChina, Mitsubishi in Japan and South Korea’s KOGAS.

During the summer, LNG Canada opened a major worker camp in Kitimat that can accommodate up to 4,500.

In the spring, the project had to cut in half its 1,500 workforce because of safety concerns related to the coronavirus pandemic. With safety measures now in place, Canada LNG says there are more than 3,200 people working on the project.

“Despite certain impacts resulting from the COVID-19 virus, LNG Canada and our engineering procurement and construction contractor JGC Fluor JV continue to hit critical construction milestones,” said Susannah Pierce, Canada LNG’s director or corporate affairs. “We remain committed to delivering first cargo by the middle of this decade.”

However, one of the two players that won the engineering procurement and construction contract, Texas-based engineering firm Fluor Corp., acknowledged in an earnings call at the end of September that the project was behind schedule because of the pandemic.

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