Bangladesh's first LNG import terminal

Bangladesh's generation mix had been built on domestic gas, and domestic gas was declining faster than new discoveries replaced it. Importing LNG was the only route to firm capacity at the scale the grid needed, and no LNG import infrastructure of any kind existed.

A floating storage and regasification unit solves the capital and timetable problem, but it creates a legal one: it is a vessel, a terminal and a gas utility at the same time, and Bangladeshi law had no settled treatment of any combination of those. There was no precedent transaction to copy from, in-country or regionally comparable.

Acted on PPP transaction advisory, project development and permitting — structuring the project within the public-private partnership framework and the energy regulatory regime, and identifying the approvals the project would actually need rather than the ones a comparable project elsewhere would have needed.

Worked through the interface between the marine and energy regimes: vessel status and registration, port and terminal arrangements, the regasification and sales agreements, and the government support and offtake documentation that make a project of this kind bankable to a development finance institution.

Negotiated alongside the sponsor's international counsel to a timetable set outside Bangladesh.

The country's first LNG terminal project. The documentation developed for it has informed the structure of subsequent LNG and import infrastructure work in Bangladesh.

The firm has since advised on further LNG asset transactions in the market, including for Mitsubishi.