[fian]

To expand on this a bit, oil and particularly liquefied natural gas (LNG) production facilities are hard to stop and restart. Many systems need to be at a particular temperature, hydrates can form in gas pipelines during long shutdowns and thus need chemical back injection to manage, hot/cold cycling of equipment cause thermal degradation and many other challenges.

So a lot of design work for oil and gas production facilities is around minimising shutdowns. A large part of this is working out storage capacities, and for LNG, the shipping rates. If the LNG carriers (tankers) are unable to offload at a receiving terminal there is a higher chance the LNG loading terminal will reach tank tops. Tank tops at the loading terminal means the upstream production facility will need to turn down or stop all production. Given the high costs (capital and production opportunity) that incurs for the production facility, it might be better to take a short term loss for a few cargoes to prevent the tank tops at the loading terminal and thus a production shutdown.