Natural gas cooled to a liquid so it can be shipped by sea.
A ship that stores LNG and turns it back into gas — a floating import terminal.
Cargo transferred directly between two vessels, without a fixed terminal.
Operations at sea, away from a fixed onshore terminal.
The berths and equipment where a vessel actually connects to load or discharge cargo.
LNG is natural gas — mostly methane — that has been cooled to about −162°C (−260°F) until it turns into a liquid. In liquid form it takes up roughly 1/600th of the volume it would as a gas, which is what makes it practical to load onto a ship and move across oceans instead of through a pipeline.
The same gas molecule goes through all of these stages before it reaches a home or power plant on the other side of the ocean.
An FSRU is a ship — usually a converted or purpose-built LNG carrier — that stays moored in one place and does the job of an entire onshore import terminal: it receives LNG, stores it, and turns it back into gas before sending it ashore through a pipeline. It's a terminal that floats instead of one built on land.
STS is exactly what it sounds like: two vessels come alongside each other — at anchor, underway, or in a sheltered area — and cargo is transferred directly from one to the other, without either ship ever touching a fixed jetty or terminal.
"Offshore" is the umbrella term for any operation that happens out at sea rather than at a fixed onshore facility. In the LNG world, that covers a specific set of assets and activities — not a single thing, but a category.
A marine terminal is the physical facility where a vessel actually moors to load or discharge cargo — the berths, jetties and equipment that connect the ship to the shore, or to another floating unit. Every other term on this page eventually passes through one.
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