Wes Edens’ New Fortress Energy sees profit plummet as delayed project takes $150m bite

New Fortress Energy witnessed a major profit decline on the back of its delayed offshore project Fast LNG in Mexico.

The US-listed company, reported net loss of $86.9m for the second quarter, compared with net income of $120m in the same quarter a year ago.

Revenue for the quarter also declined to $428.01m from $561.4m in the previous year.

The company also saw a net loss $30.2m from $271.7m in the corresponding six-month period of 2023. Total revenue for the period reached $1.11bn from $1.14bn in the first half of last year.

Wes Edens, CEO of New Fortress Energy, said: “Our Adjusted EBITDA in the second quarter of $120m was well below our expectation of $275m.

“This was entirely the result of delays in placing our FLNG 1 project into service, which was originally expected to occur at the beginning of the second quarter.”

The cost of this delay is approximately $150m per quarter in lost operating margin, which represents the vast majority of the Adjusted EBITDA shortfall for the quarter, he explained.

“Our goal was to bring it online for April of this year. For a variety of reasons, we missed this by several months,” Edens said during the company results call adding, “delays happen.”

However, the project is now up running as of July 19 and has been performing “very well”, according to Edens.

As promised, its first partial cargo was loaded today onto the 138,000-cbm Energos Princess (built 2003).

Edens confirmed that after this first load, the 1.4m tonnes per annum capacity Fast LNG will undergo a scheduled maintenance outage of approximately a week.

“Once it is fired back up, it will achieve full production levels shortly thereafter,” he affirmed.

New Fortress also provided an update on its three-mtpa, FSRU-based terminal in Nicaragua which will support a 290-MW power plant.

This project, due to be online in June, is currently 90% complete and is expected to commence operations by the fourth quarter of 2024.