German gases and engineering group Linde has been tapped to provide engineering and procurement services for a 2.1 million t/y natural gas liquefaction plant for Canada's Woodfibre LNG Limited, a subsidiary of energy resources development company Pacific Oil & Gas (PO&G).

Linde Engineering will be responsible for the extended basic engineering as well as the procurement and supply of critical equipment items including the coil-wound heat exchangers for the plant to be built near Vancouver, British Columbia, and go on stream in 2018.

The facility will use Linde's proprietary LIMUM technology, a multi-stage mixed refrigerant process which the company said achieves outstanding energy efficiency. Based on an all-electric-drive using hydro power only, the plant's environmental footprint with regard to Greenhouse Gas Emissions (GHG) has been minimized.

"This project, the second largest Linde-engineered LNG plant, surpassed in capacity only by the LNG facility on Melkøya Island near Hammerfest, Norway, is of high strategic value, as it bridges the gap in the LNG industry between traditional mid-scale and large-scale LNG trains," said executive board member Aldo Belloni.

Project director Alex Bridgen, said Woodfibre LNG is on track to become one of the first LNG export facilities in operation on the west coast of Canada.