Venture Global starts preparing third phase of Plaquemines

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Venture Global starts preparing third phase of Plaquemines

Venture Global Inc., Arlington, Va., has submitted a request to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to expand its Plaquemines LNG plant with a third phase that would add 24 liquefaction trains and 18 million tonnes/year of capacity. The leaders of Venture Global said late last year that their teams had loaded the first cargo from […]

The leaders of Venture Global said late last year that their teams had loaded the first cargo from the Plaquemines plant in Port Sulphur, La. (OGJ Online, Dec. 27, 2024). Construction work is ongoing at the complex’s first two phases—which will have nameplate capacity of 13.3 million tpy and 6.7 million tpy—and their commercial operation dates are expected to be late 2026 and mid-2027, respectively. Executives said 16 of the first phase’s 24 trains have produced LNG to date.

“This flexible incremental capacity would position us to respond rapidly to market growth signals,” chief executive officer Mike Sabel said on a Mar. 6 conference call discussing the company’s fourth-quarter results and 2025 outlook.

“In a capital-intensive commodity industry, capital will always flow to the most competitive projects and we believe that an expansion of Plaquemines is one of the most economically efficient opportunities available to quickly meet LNG demand.”

A final investment decision on Phase 3, which would cost about $18 billion, is expected in mid-2027. The first LNG would be produced roughly 18-24 months after that.

Sabel and his team also provided an update on the cost of building Plaquemines’ first two phases, saying they will likely cost $23.3-23.8 billion to complete. That’s a roughly $2 billion increase from the previous forecast and, at the midpoint, a jump of 9.5%. At end-2024, Venture Global had spent $19.8 billion of that figure.

In addition to the cost update, Sabel and his team also surprised investors by forecasting 2025 adjusted core profits of $6.8-7.4 billion. Analysts had expected more than $8.6 billion.

Those updates and the broader earnings report—which showed a fourth-quarter net profit of $990 million (helped by a big interest-rate swaps gain) on revenues of $1.5 billion—led investors to slash the value of Venture Global shares (Ticker: VG). In afternoon trading, they were down more than 30% to $9.72. They went public in late January at $25 apiece.

Venture Global exported 32 cargos in the fourth quarter, down from 40 in late 2023. For the full year, the company exported 140 cargos and executives are forecasting that number will grow past 350 this year. Of that total, Plaquemines will produce 219-239 cargos while the company’s Calcasieu project is forecast to export 140-148 cargos. Calcasieu’s expected commercial operation date is Apr. 15. (OGJ Online, Feb. 17, 2025).

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Minnesota PUC Says No to Amazon’s Bid to Fast-Track 250 Diesel Generators for Data Center

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Microsoft will invest $80B in AI data centers in fiscal 2025

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OpenAI’s red teaming innovations define new essentials for security leaders in the AI era

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More OpenAI has taken a more aggressive approach to red teaming than its AI competitors, demonstrating its security teams’ advanced capabilities in two areas: multi-step reinforcement and external red teaming. OpenAI recently released two papers that set a new competitive standard for improving the quality, reliability and safety of AI models in these two techniques and more. The first paper, “OpenAI’s Approach to External Red Teaming for AI Models and Systems,” reports that specialized teams outside the company have proven effective in uncovering vulnerabilities that might otherwise have made it into a released model because in-house testing techniques may have missed them. In the second paper, “Diverse and Effective Red Teaming with Auto-Generated Rewards and Multi-Step Reinforcement Learning,” OpenAI introduces an automated framework that relies on iterative reinforcement learning to generate a broad spectrum of novel, wide-ranging attacks. Going all-in on red teaming pays practical, competitive dividends It’s encouraging to see competitive intensity in red teaming growing among AI companies. When Anthropic released its AI red team guidelines in June of last year, it joined AI providers including Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, and even the U.S.’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which all had released red teaming frameworks. Investing heavily in red teaming yields tangible benefits for security leaders in any organization. OpenAI’s paper on external red teaming provides a detailed analysis of how the company strives to create specialized external teams that include cybersecurity and subject matter experts. The goal is to see if knowledgeable external teams can defeat models’ security perimeters and find gaps in their security, biases and controls that prompt-based testing couldn’t find. What makes OpenAI’s recent papers noteworthy is how well they define using human-in-the-middle

Gemini Robotics brings AI into the physical world

Research

Published
12 March 2025

Authors
Carolina Parada

Introducing Gemini Robotics, our Gemini 2.0-based model designed for roboticsAt Google DeepMind,

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