Good day, and welcome to the Fast LNG update call. At this time, all participants are on a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star then one on your touch-tone telephone. If anyone should require assistance during the conference, please press star then zero to reach an operator. As a reminder, this call is being recorded. I would like to turn the call over to Brett Magill, Managing Director and Head of Investor Relations. You may begin.
Thank you, Michelle. Good morning, everybody, and welcome to New Fortress Energy's Fast LNG update conference call. This call is being recorded and will be available by replay until April 8th. We plan to reference our Fast LNG update presentation, which we released yesterday evening. The presentation is posted to our website and will remain available after today's call. The presentation includes a series of important disclosures related to forward-looking statements. We encourage participants to review these important disclosures in addition to the description of risk factors contained in our SEC filings. Joining me here today is Wes Edens, CEO and Chairman of the Board, along with several other members of the NFE team. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Wes.
Okay. Great. Thanks, Brett. Thanks for calling in, everyone. Obviously, I expect that all of you saw the announcements that we made yesterday about our Fast LNG update. We posted a brief summary on the web page that hopefully you all have, and I'll refer to that. Let me just give a little bit of background on what we see in the world and what our focus is. I'll spend a couple of minutes on this and then just answer a bunch of questions. We obviously got inundated with a lot of calls yesterday. We just want to make sure everyone has access to all the information at the same time. So we'll just give you a little bit of color around that. So we'll just state the obvious. We are very much in a global energy crisis.
The war in Ukraine underscores the pronounced risks that Europe has in relying on Russian gas. There's uncertainty with respect to supply of gas and energy and electricity in general. I mean, the big picture is Russia supplies 40% of Europe's natural gas. The numbers, numerically, that's 155 BCMs. That's the equivalent of about 100 million tons of LNG production. And just to replace just half of that supply, they would need the incremental 50 million tons. That's the big picture kind of overview of it. When we look at the world, my view, our view, is that the world was structurally short on natural gas before the war. There's roughly 400 million tons, a little less than that, of actual production in 2021.
So if you believe, as I do, as we do, that there was actually a structural short going into it, you add an incremental need of 50 million tons, you can see what a big impact that it has. The Fast LNG solution that we have been talking about for the last year and a half or so, we believe, can help alleviate the current energy crisis. We have a fleet of jack-up rigs and semi-submersible vessels. This is the marine infrastructure that we intend to install our equipment onto. We ordered equipment years ago. So in hindsight, it looks prescient. We obviously didn't predict this, but we did see that there was a gigantic need in the market for faster, cheaper, better, more environmentally friendly solutions. And so that's what started with this. And then earlier this year, we then intensified our focus on domestic solutions.
We filed a permanent application with the Maritime Administration that we referenced yesterday. That's a brief 8,000-page document that we met them in the parking lot and gave to them in the middle of the day on Wednesday. This starts a review process by the Maritime Administration that actually rolls up into the Department of Transportation that we have hopes and beliefs that this can conclude in relatively short order and are looking forward to now getting into the final stages of our construction, installation, and hopefully have the permits to actually put this in place here by the end of the year. With that, let's turn to the brief summary that we have here and look at page number two. Just to recap, we announced FID on our first Fast LNG unit in January 2021, so just under a year and a half ago.
The decision to do so was based on our belief that we thought that there was the need for additional market volumes, and in our business, our growing business around the world, we are very desirous of having the ability to produce LNG and gas for our own customers, and so thus, kind of closing the loop and basically being a fully integrated company is what we really wanted to do. We did so without having a place to put the liquefiers, so basically, it was definitely a calculated risk and exposure that we didn't know exactly what we were going to do, but I was optimistic. We were optimistic that we would find places around the world to do so. That then set off a string of travel in the middle of COVID.
I think, as I said, I visited 19 countries in 12 months, so I had an extensive travel schedule. I was with people in the company. We visited a lot of opportunities around the world. We think there are a lot of opportunities around the world. But at the end of the day, our conclusion was, just like Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz, there's no place like home. And the U.S. has incredibly abundant supplies of natural gas. It has extensive infrastructure. And of course, it has the technical capability and people to mobilize that. And so thus, our focus for our first LNG project in the world for our own portfolio is here in the United States, which that's what we announced yesterday.
We also did announce, though, in February that we have a partnership that we've agreed to with Eni to place one of the liquefiers off the coast of Congo on a large development that they've got there. And we think that these two elements of our business make a lot of sense when you view them together. So on page three, the business model itself focuses on two primary uses for FLNG. One is the tolling relationship where we basically produce the equipment, we charge a lease rate for it, we enter into a transaction with a highly critical counterparty, buy a portion of the offtakes. We basically do generate supply at market prices, which is great for our portfolio. But we're really acting as a partner to the person who owns the resources, actually looking to then get their LNG out of the ground.
The merchant side of it, which is the transaction that we announced yesterday, is where we don't produce the gas, but we do produce the LNG. So basically, buy gas from the marketplace, from producers or from the market just generally. We build our own liquefiers. We liquefy it ourselves. And this is the process that we're talking about, initially starting off the coast of Louisiana. That provides market volumes for the portfolio. One nuance to this that I think is actually quite important, and so I'll just focus on it now, is when you look at the way that LNG production is financed in large part around the world, what happens is that in order to pay for the LNG facility, people pre-sell all the volumes.
So it's not an oversimplification to say of the 400 million tons of production of LNG there in the world, roughly 400 million tons of it has been pre-sold. It's not exactly that, but it's illustrated with the fact that the vast majority of it sold, those contracts that are actually entered into then provide the foundation for the financing of the LNG production facility itself because these are large projects. What we have done is quite different. What we have done basically is we're building our LNG production facilities, and we are unencumbered by our forward contracts. And what that means in very simple terms is we then have market volumes that we can then sell into the marketplace for the crisis in Europe and caused by the war in Ukraine in particular. This is a very, very relevant point.
So just to put context to it, when President Biden went to Europe and said the U.S. wanted to be a great ally and to be a part of the solution in replacing some of the dependence on Russian gas, and we wanted to supply 15 BCM of gas. 15 BCM of gas is about 10 million tons. It's about 11 million tons, actually, to be precise. Our 2.8 million-ton unencumbered facilities are roughly 25% of that. And that's a significant balance. And when you look at the challenge of producing LNG, it's not a technical challenge. It's really a challenge of time. And so the land-based facilities can take three, four, five, six years to develop between permitting and actual construction. Our Fast LNG is called Fast LNG for a reason.
We think that the production, number one, we've already committed on it and started work on it a year and a half ago. So that's a valuable piece of time behind us. Number two, just the nature of what we're doing, which is to take liquefiers, put them onto existing marine infrastructure, and then assemble and put in place, is just a much faster production process than doing it on shore. So when you look at page number four, the goal for the company really is to build a virtual Fast LNG factory. I say factory in quotation marks because it's not a technical factory. It's not a place with a big roof on it someplace where everyone shows up for work every day. But we're using the shipyards in Texas. We're assembling our modules in that yard. It's transported then to the shipyard. It's then assembled in place.
Then the marine infrastructure is then either towed or it steams out to wherever it's going. We have a portfolio of jack-up rigs that we have purchased and are working on. We're working on a number of fixed platforms. Then we have these Sevan ships, these big drill ships that are actually in the process now of being engineered and cleaned up in preparation for being part of this. Page number five, the addition of Fast LNG does create this fully integrated business model. We started our business as a company by going to our customers downstream and trying to help them solve their problems. Build power plants, supply gas to them, provide gas for industrial purposes, provide gas for transportation, go to the customer, solve the problem.
As I said many times before, if you want to make a great fortune, you should start by solving a big problem. The problem downstream is significant. People lack access to clean, affordable, environmentally friendly energy. That's been our mission all along, and that's where we started. We now have a dozen roughly terminals around the world. It's a bit of a geography quiz when you run around them, but basically, it's Jamaica and Puerto Rico and Mexico and Nicaragua, Brazil, Sri Lanka, etc., etc. When we started this business, never did I really think that we would then look to Europe to be a natural place for us to be expressing our business, given that they had significant amounts of supply from pipelines, in particular from Russia. Obviously, with the war in Ukraine, all that has changed. In my view, it has changed forever in the future.
I think that now there's a real focus on not just the cost of energy, but the security of energy. Energy security is a huge, huge issue. With that, I think you're going to see a huge shift in terms of how the Europeans view their own energy security and what role LNG plays in that, and thus the role that we have on it. From our standpoint, we then in the midstream side, we have access to about 20% of the world's FSRUs. We have a number of other ships that we either own or we lease in. Liquefaction for us is really just closing the loop because this now provides us this fully integrated model where we now produce LNG for our own customers and other customers around the world.
So just a little bit about the specifics of what we're doing here on page number six. You can see that basically we're developing our first U.S.-based LNG off the coast of Louisiana. We completed FID in the process of developing the first two liquefiers, totaling 2.8 million tons. It'll be put 16 miles offshore. So it's just outside the 12-mile circumference that actually puts it into MARAD jurisdiction. The most important aspect of it, when you look at the schematic on the right-hand side, is you can see the jack-up rigs and the fixed platforms with the liquefaction on them. And then you see the ships that's there. The way that this works in very simple terms is there's a pipeline that runs underneath the water that we have contracted with. That pipeline then buys gas off of U.S. trunk lines. There's an interconnect that is put there.
The gas comes up to these liquefaction facilities. The liquefiers themselves then process the gas, turn it into LNG. A very fancy cryogenic hose then connects it to a ship. That ship fills up on average every 10 days or so. The ship fills up. Another ship pulls alongside. There's a ship-to-ship transfer. The LNG is put onto it, and that's the logistics chain that then allows us to then bring it to the different markets. We have done more ship-to-ship transfers than any other company in the hemisphere, so this is not a new technology or a new process for it. It's just basically using exactly what we've been doing and now expressing it in a different way. One of the main reasons why we believe that the offshore liquefaction is such a big step in the right direction is that essentially we are repurposing old ships as storage.
If you're building the liquefiers on shore, building storage is a big, big part of the cost, a big, big part of the time. It's a big part of the environmental footprint of it and putting it there. So by basically recycling old ships, by using old ships because they don't really have to be highly efficient ships because they're really just acting as storage, it's a big recycling operation. And by doing so, we use existing ships for the storage. It's a very efficient way of doing it. It cuts down the time. It cuts down the cost substantially. So, about the application itself. The bottom line from my standpoint is it's a very extensive application. This is not like filling out an application for a credit card, right? This is 8,000 pages. It's 13 environmental reports.
It's a tremendous amount of engineering, environmental process, and whatnot, and really, the way that the process works, if you look at page number eight, is very straightforward. You file it, which we did this week. There's 21 days that MARAD takes to look at the 8,000 pages and determine that it's a complete application, which, of course, we believe it is. Again, one of the nuances of this is that we are not really permitting a project. We're really permitting what we're already building, and so my experience, and we've had a lot of experience in building things, is the more specific you can be about what you're permitting, the more clarity you're giving to the regulatory agencies, and the better off your interactions are, and so that's exactly what the situation is here.
Once that 21 days goes by and there's a stamp that's put on it that says it's an effective application, then the hard work begins with all the agencies that have to work on it. I was in Washington with a team yesterday. We met with a bunch of different lawmakers and people on Capitol Hill, White House, etc. Our message for them was simply to tell them what we were doing, number one. Number two, not to request that they change any of the rules for us. That's not what we want. Simply put, what I would like to see happen, especially given the situation of the world, is that they actually all operate in concert with each other. In the most basic terms, what that means is review our application simultaneously, not sequentially. That can cut down the time dramatically.
Our construction schedule basically will be complete by the end of this year. In an ideal world, that would actually mesh up with when the MARAD process itself finishes, and we have a project which is completed from a construction standpoint, and we're working 24 hours a day on that every day of the year, and then the permitting side actually meets up with that. Page nine, I already mentioned this, but I'll just, here's the numbers. The solution is significantly faster and less expensive than traditional liquefaction facilities. The traditional LNG, 60 months, $1.2 billion for this 1.4 million tons. Environmental footprint is significant. Our liquefier is 50%-70% less. Cost of construction, basically half is what we think, and the impact is obviously minimal because we're already using the storage.
The air permit for this, when you think of what actually happens on a liquefier, is gas comes in. It's already been treated. It then is put into the cold box, which is the piece of technology you buy and plug in place. You provide compression, and you provide the power for that compression. And gas runs through the cold box, and LNG runs out the bottom of it. It actually is that simple. In round terms, each liquefier, 1.4 million tons, takes about 25 MW of power. So when you think of the environmental footprint of this, obviously there's many, many thousands of power plants in the United States that produce 25 MW of power. That's basically the environmental footprint that we have. The platform or the marine infrastructure we're installing, there are literally tens of thousands of marine infrastructure like this installed around the world.
There are many thousands of these installed in the Gulf of Mexico. So we really talked to the permitting agencies. We were saying, "Look, we're going to install a platform. We're going to install jack-up rigs." This is something they're very familiar with. They've seen over and over and over again. And then the only thing that's unique is the liquefier on top with the small power plant that actually provides the power to get this done. Page 10, which is really the last page of this, is really finishing where we started. Natural gas prices rose dramatically last year before there was a war in Ukraine. So there was a systemic shortage of gas and LNG around the world, obviously greatly exacerbated by the war in Ukraine. And it probably extends the duration of that shortage for a long time.
I mean, there is no question in my mind that European governments are going to change their energy profile, their energy security profile. And as a result, there's going to be a pronounced shortage. And the way to fix that is to basically provide gas from our standpoint. I think it's a massive geopolitical event for the United States. It gives us great ability to be a big part of the solution of this. And we want to do our part for that. As I said, the supply is constrained because, number one, the volumes are largely already committed. And number two is it takes a long time to do it.
One of the aspects of this when I look at it is that, as is always the case, the people that are going to suffer the most from this lack of supply are the people that can least afford to do it. Because what's going to happen is a practical matter, and it's already happening right now, is there's no new supply that's created to address this. What happens is supply simply gets diverted from other people, and so the poorer countries in the world, the people who are least able to pay for it, they suffer because the supplies are priced up and then moved away from them. The first derivative of the energy crisis from a power standpoint, of course, is food. Because one of the big users of natural gas in the world is the fertilizer business, ammonia, being the feedstock for that.
Ammonia prices have risen dramatically as a result of this. Fertilizer prices have risen dramatically. So it really is an existential energy crisis that occurs not only on the power side of it, but also on the food side of it. So it's a big issue. And with that, that's the narrative. I'm going to pause and we'll answer a few questions on it. And so please open it up for us.
Thanks, Michelle. We'll go ahead and take it into Q&A from here.
As a reminder to ask a question, please press star then one. Our first question comes from Spiro Dounis with Credit Suisse. Your line is open.
Thanks, operator. Good morning, everybody. Wesley, back to that concept of the Fast LNG factory that you mentioned. Pretty common question we got over the last day was, what is preventing you from adding several more of these units in the Gulf of Mexico or elsewhere over the next three years? To your point on the structural shortage, there's really only Golden Pass coming online between now and 2024. And then after that, kind of a big void again until about 2026, 2027. So curious how you're thinking about the speed at which you can add these units and what some of the practical constraints are here.
Sure. So with respect to the locations that we can put this into, basically any place where there are pipeline connections from the shore where there's adequate gas supply, you can put it. So you look around the United States, that obviously is the case in Louisiana. It's obviously the case in Texas. And it could be in other places as well if they had adequate pipelines. One aside is that in our learning and investigation of the gas markets in the United States, my simple view is that we don't really have a gas shortage problem. What we really have is a pipeline and infrastructure and regulatory challenge. Because really, you have significant pipeline constraints.
And I'm not trying to solve all the problems of the energy world, but the obvious conclusion you reach when you look at this is there are significant constraints on the pipeline side of it. And that's what causes a lack of production. That's something obviously that can be addressed from a regulatory standpoint. But I think it's the obvious constraint with this. From our standpoint, this factory notion is quite simple. What we want to do is, to the extent possible, create a repeatable engineering process that we can then shorten the timeframe, lower the cost, and actually produce more rapidly. We have world-class partners that are working with us on this. So it's Baker Hughes, and it's Fluor, and it's Kiewit. And we have tremendous partners on this.
Our engineering team, which is a very, very capable team, has done a great job of creating not only our first and second and third liquefiers, but also a real template for us to repeat this. The long lead items in the liquefaction business are the specialized turbines and compressor strings. There's lots of different parts that go into it, including the cold box and whatnot. Those are truly the long lead items. Fortunately, those are the things that we procured some time ago. That's what allows us to go at such speed here. We're also very focused with our partners in creating this true factory where we make a commitment to a number of these, and then they can produce a train a month. Then it allows us to then go and source the infrastructure and get the people and move it.
So when I say factory, it really does start with the compressor strings, the turbines themselves, and then the modules that get then produced that are then put in place. That's what creates the speed of this. So we think that at the beginning of this, we're talking 2.8 million tons. This could be a five or 10 or 20 million ton program in the relatively short term, we think, if we execute this properly.
Wow. That's a helpful color. Thanks for that. Second question, just as it relates to sourcing gas for this particular unit in Gulf of Mexico. I know you mentioned basically buying at the market price. But curious how you think about any sort of formal agreements that need to be tethered to this. You're going to be out there in the Gulf of Mexico. Are you sort of just bidding away volumes from Henry Hub? And do you need to actually structure any sort of agreement with the upstreams in the Gulf of Mexico?
Yeah. So great question. The pipeline itself that is connected to this, we actually signed the agreements with that company yesterday. That was not a manufacturer signing. It was actually just a natural process. We've been working with them for a number of months. But we signed the definitive agreements on the pipeline that we're using on the offshore yesterday. The interconnects then give us an array of different options. And we're now really starting serious conversations with marketers to help us look at what supplies are available, and then direct producers. And as with most things in life, my view is that there will be some combination of all those things. And from the producer's standpoint, we're an attractive customer because we're looking to have 24/7, 365 offtake, which is what they want to run their business and make their plans.
From our standpoint, we want exactly the counterpoint to that. So there's a good marriage there. But also from the just marketing standpoint, there's lots of gas in the system, right? And so hiring one or more marketers to help us access those volumes in the most efficient way is really what the plan will be.
Got it. That's a helpful color. That's all I had today, guys. Thanks for the time.
Our next question comes from Martin Malloy with Johnson Rice. Your line is open.
Good morning. Thank you for taking my question. The first question, just I wanted to go over the cost for this. It looks like maybe $600 million-$800 million is what you're talking about here. And looking at the illustration on page six, it's a combination of jack-ups and fixed platforms. But maybe if you could make sure that I'm thinking about it correctly, that would be helpful.
Yeah, that's correct. We think that for installations where we expect to be there for a long time, a fixed platform we think is a very, very appropriate way of doing that. The analog to that also are jack-up rigs, which actually look like fixed platforms. You can think of this as we brought these jack-up rigs and then have worked very hard to basically take everything off of them. Because at the end of the day, what you're looking for is, call it roughly 100,000 sq ft of deck space, and then sufficient size and stability to be able to support the liquefiers themselves. So it's a very homogeneous footprint is what we're looking for, regardless of the nature of the actual energy of marine infrastructure itself.
For shallow water installations where you think you're going to be around for a long time, either jack-up rigs or fixed platforms we think is great. If the term was going to be shorter than the 20 years, then you want to be able to pick it up and move it someplace. So a jack-up rig in that case, even if it was in shallow water, would be the right form of infrastructure. The Sevan ships, we've brought a couple of them thus far, and we're looking at other similar forms of infrastructure. They're actually designed to be deep water drilling ships. So they're actually their specific design, it fits the purpose exactly for some of the deeper water solutions. So what will be consistent is the nature of the liquefaction infrastructure, right? We want to use the same form of equipment on all these.
and then just the jacket, the actual marine infrastructure itself, then can be selected based on what the job is at hand.
Okay. And would you mind giving us an update on maybe discussions with Europeans in terms of potential projects over there and how that has changed over the last month or two, and maybe touch on the Ireland project?
Yeah. So I've been in Europe a couple of times in the last few weeks. The amount of focus on this, in our experience, is extraordinary, right? So people that are very, very focused not only on energy supply, but also on the infrastructure to do so. So one of the things that we're very focused on right now is we own a number of the FSRUs, so call it 20% of the world's fleet. That is also a long lead item. So if you're Germany or Italy or France or Greece or whoever, there's many, many countries that are looking at this. If they want to build import terminals, there's the infrastructure of actually building the terminal itself, which is either a lot of work or a little work, depending on the nature of the port infrastructure that's in place.
But then you need the equipment to then put next to it. That's the FSRU. So we're blessed to have an active portfolio of that. We're having lots of dialogues around that. And we think, obviously, those could be attractive situations for us. And they solve a real need for those different countries. The energy supply component of it is also something which is a hot topic. And I think the minute that we have certainty about the timing of our project from a regulatory standpoint and a construction standpoint, we can offer out firm supply. We think that there'll be many, many people that are interested in it. The Ireland project continues, as we said, we're down to a planning commission meeting, which we expect to get announced at some point in the near future.
We don't have direct visibility as to the timing of that, but we're standing by and are prepared for that. That's the last step towards the final planning decisions, which we're optimistic about. But I can't offer any timing because we're not really in charge of when they schedule that meeting. But I mean, the events in the world have certainly conspired in favor of that project, right? Energy security, which was a very good idea 12 months ago, is now an imperative today. So we feel like the need for the project and the nature of it is more important than ever.
Great. Thank you.
Our next question comes from Craig Shere with Tuohy Brothers. Your line is open.
Good morning. My first thing, I'm a little confused at the beginning because I thought one of the two FIDs you already announced was going to go to the 20-year annual toll. So I'm trying to understand, are you working on all you had the two jack-ups you bought that you're combining together to make the 100,000 sq ft platform. And then you got the two drill ships that you acquired, and you already FID'd one. Are you working on all three now?
We are working on all three. So we think that there's been no change. So the conversations with Eni are continuing at a high pace. And we're optimistic we'll get to final documents with them in the near term. And with this FID, we're now kind of announcing the FID of these two projects, one on fixed platforms and one on jack-up rigs. So sorry if there seems to be confusion. The other infrastructure, the Sevan ships we bought, at this point are unencumbered by a project. We think there's great prospects for them and have numerous inquiries, both on a merchant basis as well as on a towing basis for those. So I think you'll see a string of projects that we will be involved with on this side.
As I said, the long lead item for them is not the marine infrastructure, but it's really the liquefaction trains themselves.
And beyond those three things, the two jack-ups and the two ships that could support three projects separate from the fixed platform that you're talking about, what is the opportunity set out there to just pick up additional old dilapidated marine infrastructure as needed? And then separately, a number of clients have asked, "Well, if it's just buying pennies on the dollar, decades-old marine infrastructure and using third-party technology, why can't anybody do this?" Maybe you can talk about why you have a year or two lead time on everybody else in terms of internal engineering work, equipment bought on spec, and various kinds of relationships that have been developed over the last year way ahead of anybody else.
You can start on page one, get to page 8,000. That'll be a good place to start. No, we have, we believe, actually a unique set of technical capabilities and balance sheet and the capital and the experience to be very efficient about this. Like all things in the world, if it's a good idea, there will certainly be people that will do it as well. I think that when you look at the first towing agreement that we're putting in place with Eni, Eni is one of the most sophisticated oil companies in the world. They're also one of the most sophisticated gas and liquefaction companies. They have built liquefaction on land. They have built liquefaction on a ship. And they have selected us, presumably because they think we can do it faster and cheaper and are a better solution than simply doing it themselves.
That's not to say that they wouldn't do it themselves. I'm sure that they think about that, as all these folks do. But I think that the sustainable competitive advantages are the three words that are right at the top of every investment that we look at. That's the goal for all of us. I think the sustainable competitive advantages here are the experience set to do so, the capital that is required to do it, the will that is necessary to take risk and take FID, and then lastly, it's just the execution of it and when you look at the decision that we took at the beginning of last year, so nearly a year and a half ago, to build these on a speculative basis, I knew, we knew at the time that that would either be a very good decision or a very poor decision.
But it was unlikely to be an average one. And had we not taken that decision, the dialogues that we would have had in the 19 countries and 12 months around the world would have been very, very different. We'd have been talking about the death of infrastructure projects. There's many that are proposed, and there's far fewer that are actually built. And so just simply being in a position where you've made the commitment, you've committed the capital, you've committed the time and process to it, puts you in a very, very different position than somebody who shows up with a flip book that says, "Here's what we're thinking about doing." And so I don't think that there is anything that cannot be replicated by people that are listening to this call or people that are actually out in the marketplace.
Time is the one commodity that you cannot buy. So the last year and a half of time that has been spent on this is a significant advantage for us. And what I would say, and anything when you're looking at innovation and entrepreneurship, it's not about what you have done. It's about what you will do. And if there is a competitive advantage for our firm and for my focus on it and the individuals working on this, it's that we are very willful about what we're doing on this. I mean, to give it a very pointed perspective, we have a call at 8:00 A.M. every morning of the year on the FLNG projects and have done so for the last year and a half.
Sometimes it's a short call, and sometimes it's a long call, but we basically put everybody that's involved in the project on the phone and go through what the different challenges are, be they technical or they're regulatory or they're on the permitting side, gas side, pipelines. There's a whole litany of things we go through every day. I think that's what's allowed us to move this project from a concept a year and a half ago to something where we file an 8,000-page permit, and we're really ready to go. Of course, we obviously thought there was a need for it when we went FID on it. That need has become more pronounced with the events of last summer when the market first became dislocated, and obviously even more pronounced with the events in Ukraine and the war with Russia.
Thanks, Wes. And just to cap it off, that question about the availability of additional infrastructure for FLNG 4, 5, and 6 to be able to buy 20million- 40 million at a crack of new marine infrastructure, can you do that anytime?
Yeah. I think that the marine infrastructure question is a really, really good one. The jack-up rigs we bought are a great solution for part of it. We think fixed platforms, which are really new construction for the most part, are also a good solution. The Sevan ships, I'm excited about. One of our customers I talked to a couple of days ago was very excited about because you're buying a $670 million piece of equipment for $11 million. So you start in a pretty good place. There's obviously a lot of work that has to be done to make it suitable for this. But I think you'll see a range of different marine infrastructure aspects to it. On the ship side, I would call them mature, not dilapidated. But they're not dilapidated at all. They're just less efficient, right?
The nature of gas is it's actually quite a clean product, so if you walked inside the tank of a 40-year-old LNG tank, which I have done before, it's in remarkably new condition, right, so there's not a lot of corrosion. There's not a lot of product. It'd be a very different experience walking inside the tank of a 40-year-old oil tank, to say the least, so the infrastructure itself is not dilapidated. It's simply less efficient, and really, that means the method of propulsion for it has changed dramatically, so that's the big difference for it. The ships themselves are in terrific conditions, and the tanks themselves are in terrific conditions, so it's not that so much. It's really that the propulsion itself is just less efficient, but there's lots and lots and lots of options for that.
Thank you.
Thanks, Craig. Michelle, we have time for one more question, I think, if we have another one.
Okay. Our next question comes from Sam Margolin with Wolfe Research. Your line is open.
Hey, everyone. Thanks for squeezing me in. Just want to nail down the commercial side a little bit because your re-gas assets, your terminals are fully committed. You don't have any gas procurement needs to fill your committed sales volumes, but you've got spare capacity and presumably a lot of customers behind them who would love to pay a discounted price for gas relative to TTF today. And you don't need $20 per BTU margins to generate a ton of cash through your system. So I just wonder if you could speak to how you envision the commercial piece of this new Fast project and maybe what kind of market exposure you're trying to get on the pricing side.
Yeah, sure. So you're right. We are fully committed with our customers, which is great, right? We would not want to be short in this market. We're actually net long in this market. So that's an important point, and you're focused on that correctly, in my view. And you're also correct. In our downstream terminals, we have substantial amounts of demand, to say the least, right? And across our portfolio, we think by our measure, we are something like 15, 20, 25% in a different terminal in terms of capacity. So there's lots and lots of room for us to supply additional volumes to people. And then thus it becomes all about the gas that we're able to procure either in the marketplace or to do it ourselves. Our view is that the portfolio over time will be a balanced one.
We announced recently we bought a couple million tons from the Venture Global folks. We have bought gas from Cheniere. We bought gas from Shell. We bought gas from the major producers in the world. That's not going to change. We think that that's an important component of our business. We think that these guys have terrific businesses, sources of supply. They're very important counterparties for us. Adding the Fast LNG allows us to grow our portfolio and perhaps be a little bit more flexible in terms of what we can offer our customers. And so not just on price, but flexibility, that gives us a big advantage. And that's something we're very focused on. The arithmetic behind this particular project is actually really simple. Each of the liquefiers will generate about 70 TBtus, right? So add the two of them up, it's 140.
Our on-cost will be Henry Hub plus operating costs and liquefaction. So today, that would be a massive discount to where the market is. We obviously don't think that the market like that is going to persist forever, but obviously, it's a big, big delta between what it costs us to produce and what the market would be for a marginal cargo today. But really, the way that I view the business plan is produce gas at a very low price, right? That is unfettered by contracts, build a portfolio of terminals, and continue to build the ones that we've got and look for additional opportunities to build them. Access to those terminals and customers gives you real downside protection in terms of your ability to sell at a profit relative to what you have produced it as.
Then you retain the optionality for these spikes and high prices that allow you to generate truly kind of the higher marginal returns in a market that is as disruptive as this. My view is, and this is what I said in the last earnings call, is that even without this war, there is likely to be more disruptions in the future just given the nature of the world and what the supply and demand relationships are. A business that has very limited amounts of downside, very stable long-term returns, and the ability to generate these meaningful profits during these short swing periods, that's a great business. That's the business that we have built. I mean, to put the specific numbers on it, so we were $33 million in EBITDA in 2020. We were $605 million in EBITDA in 2021.
We have given guidance that we expect it to be $1 billion plus this year. Obviously, just doing the math on 140 TBtus with any kind of a marginal spread, and you can certainly do the arithmetic on that, the upside is many multiples of that, hopefully in the very near future, so.
Got it. Thank you very much. I'll take the rest offline. Have a good one.
Okay. Thank you, everybody, for joining today. We appreciate your time and look forward to being in touch in the near future. Great. Thanks, everyone.
This concludes the program. You may now disconnect. Everyone, have a great day.