Bangladesh Brings Foreign Experts to Repair Damaged FSRU as LNG Recovery Could Take Weeks

Dhaka, July 26, 2026 — US-based Excelerate Energy has brought in foreign technical experts to repair the damaged Floating Storage and Regasification Unit (FSRU) operating in Moheshkhali and resume its operation, as the country's industrial and household gas supply continues to deteriorate nearly a week after a fire incident forced the unit offline. The shutdown has cut gas supply to the national grid by approximately 450 million cubic feet per day (mmcfd), with full recovery potentially taking another couple of weeks. ⚠

🚢 The FSRU — a critical piece of Bangladesh's LNG import infrastructure — has remained out of operation since Tuesday following a fire incident. The unit plays a central role in Bangladesh's energy system by receiving imported Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) cargoes, storing the fuel, and converting it back into natural gas before supplying to the national grid for distribution to households, factories, and power plants.

📊 Scale of the Disruption

📈 The shutdown of the Excelerate Energy-operated FSRU has already cut gas supply to the national grid by around 450 mmcfd, with cascading effects across multiple sectors of the economy:

• 🏭 Industrial production disrupted — gas pressure reductions have forced factories in key industrial zones to reduce output
• ⚡ Power generation squeezed — gas-fired power plants facing fuel shortages, reducing electricity generation capacity
• ⛽ CNG stations at minimum capacity — compressed natural gas filling stations unable to operate continuously
• 👨‍🍳 Household cooking gas affected — many households in Dhaka and elsewhere left with little or no gas for much of the day

🚗 CNG Crisis Hits Transport Sector

🚢 Farhan Noor, Secretary General of the Bangladesh CNG Filling Station and Conversion Workshop Owners Association, described the operational impact on the country's CNG infrastructure:

"CNG (compressed natural gas) filling stations are running at minimum capacity. The filling stations are failing to operate continuously due to the crisis."

🚗 Long queues of vehicles in front of CNG filling stations across the country have become a regular sight as a direct consequence of the FSRU shutdown. For a country where a significant portion of public transport and commercial vehicles run on CNG, the disruption has created immediate knock-on effects on commuter mobility and goods transportation — with potential inflationary implications as transport costs rise.

🏠 Households Bear the Brunt

👨‍🍳 Consumers report that the disruption has intensified gas shortages in Dhaka and other parts of Bangladesh, where many households have been left with little or no gas for cooking for much of the day. In some areas, supplies have stopped altogether, forcing families to resort to electric cooking appliances, LPG cylinders, or alternative fuel sources — all of which carry higher costs and accessibility challenges.

🏭 Factories in key industrial zones have reportedly been forced to reduce production because of low gas pressure, with the readymade garment (RMG) sector — Bangladesh's dominant export earner — particularly vulnerable to sustained gas supply disruptions. The cumulative impact on industrial output could be substantial if the FSRU remains offline for an extended period.

🤝 Petrobangla's Response and Repair Efforts

🏛 Petrobangla, the state-owned oil and gas corporation, issued a brief statement on Saturday confirming that local and foreign technical teams were working to repair and restart the Excelerate Energy-operated FSRU in Moheshkhali, but gave no specific timeline for restoring normal gas supply. The teams were working "relentlessly" and expressed hope that the repairs would be completed "as soon as possible", the statement said.

📊 The decision by Excelerate Energy to bring in foreign experts reflects the technical complexity of the repair work. FSRUs are sophisticated floating facilities that combine LNG storage, regasification, and gas export capabilities — and repairing damaged components requires specialised expertise that may not be readily available within Bangladesh's domestic energy sector.

🚢 Bangladesh's LNG Import Infrastructure

📜 Bangladesh relies heavily on FSRUs to import Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG), which has become an increasingly important source of primary energy for the country as domestic natural gas reserves have depleted. The Excelerate Energy-operated FSRU at Moheshkhali is one of the country's two operating FSRUs, and its shutdown has exposed the vulnerability of Bangladesh's concentrated LNG import infrastructure.

📊 The Ministry of Power, Energy and Mineral Resources has previously announced plans to procure two additional FSRUs to increase gas supplies to factories and diversify the country's LNG import infrastructure — a strategy that the current crisis has underscored the urgency of implementing. However, the deployment of new FSRUs takes time, and the immediate crisis will need to be resolved through repair of the existing unit.

📈 Economic Implications

💰 The FSRU shutdown comes at a particularly sensitive moment for Bangladesh's economy, with multiple macroeconomic pressures already weighing on growth:

• 👕 RMG export pressure — the sector is already dealing with weak global demand and the new 10 percent US tariff
• ⚡ Energy sector reform urgency — PRI's Sadiq Ahmed has called for comprehensive energy sector restructuring
• 💲 Subsidy burden — Bangladesh's energy import bill has surged from $4.3B to $11.2B over five years
• 🏭 Industrial competitiveness — rising production costs eroding export margins

⚠ The 450 mmcfd reduction in gas supply is roughly equivalent to a substantial portion of Bangladesh's daily industrial gas demand, meaning that the longer the FSRU remains offline, the more significant the cumulative impact on industrial output, export earnings, and GDP growth will be.

📜 Timeline Uncertainty

⏳ While Petrobangla's statement expressed hope for an "as soon as possible" resolution, industry observers have suggested that full recovery could take another couple of weeks given the technical complexity of the repair work and the need to source specialised components. The involvement of foreign experts suggests that the damage may be more extensive than initially assessed when the government first expressed hope for partial resumption within a week.

📊 For Bangladesh's industrial sector, particularly the gas-dependent RMG, textiles, pharmaceuticals, and ceramics industries, every additional day of reduced gas supply translates into lost production, delayed export shipments, and eroded buyer confidence. The coming weeks will be critical in determining whether the FSRU can be brought back online quickly enough to prevent lasting damage to Bangladesh's industrial output and export performance.

🌏 Strategic Lessons for Energy Security

🏛 The current FSRU crisis reinforces the strategic case for diversifying Bangladesh's energy import infrastructure and accelerating the deployment of additional FSRUs. The country's heavy reliance on a small number of floating regasification units creates single points of failure that can have outsized macroeconomic consequences when incidents occur.

📊 It also underscores the broader argument advanced by energy policy experts such as Sadiq Ahmed of the Policy Research Institute, who has called for a comprehensive restructuring of Bangladesh's energy sector — including the establishment of a coherent primary energy strategy, depoliticised energy pricing, and corporatisation of public energy entities. The FSRU incident is a stark reminder that the cost of delayed energy sector reform is borne not just in fiscal terms but in real economic disruption to households, factories, and exporters.

🚢 As the foreign technical teams work to restore the Moheshkhali FSRU, attention will increasingly turn to the longer-term question of how Bangladesh can build a more resilient and diversified energy import infrastructure that is less vulnerable to single-point failures — a question that the current crisis has made impossible to defer.