Two ways to do the same job
Regasification is not technically demanding compared with liquefaction. You pump cold liquid up to pipeline pressure and warm it, usually against seawater. The engineering question is not how, but where the equipment sits and who owns it.
An onshore terminal is a permanent installation: a jetty, large storage tanks, pumps, vaporisers and a metering station connected to the grid. It is built once and lasts decades.
An FSRU puts storage and vaporisation aboard a ship moored at a jetty or a buoy. The shore side shrinks to a mooring, a gas connection and a short pipeline. The vessel is usually chartered rather than bought.
What actually differs
Speed. This is the decisive advantage. An FSRU that already exists can be chartered, modified and connected within a year or two if the marine works are simple. A greenfield onshore terminal is a four-to-six-year project once permitting is counted. When a country needs gas this winter rather than at the end of the decade, that difference outweighs everything else.
Capital and who carries it. An FSRU shifts most of the capital onto the shipowner and converts it into a charter rate. That suits a buyer who cannot or does not want to finance a terminal, or who is unsure how long the demand will last. It is also why FSRU projects can proceed without the twenty-year contracts an onshore terminal usually needs.
Cost over time. Charter rates do not stop. Over a long horizon with steady high utilisation, an owned onshore terminal generally wins on cost per unit. The comparison turns on how many years of firm demand you actually believe in.
Capacity and storage. An FSRU carries what its tanks hold, typically 125,000 to 175,000 cubic metres, and send-out is limited by the vaporisers aboard. Onshore terminals can have several tanks and much larger send-out, and their bigger buffer copes better with a delayed cargo.
Weather and marine limits. A moored ship is subject to sea state. Ship-to-ship transfer in exposed water has limits, and there are locations where an FSRU simply cannot work reliably for enough of the year.
Optionality. When the charter ends the FSRU leaves, and most retain the propulsion to trade as ordinary carriers. That flexibility is genuinely valuable when demand is uncertain, and it has no onshore equivalent: an unused terminal is a stranded asset.
How we classify them
Our terminal pages record whether a facility is onshore, an FSRU or floating liquefaction, using the tracker’s own field where it is populated and the facility name where it is not. Vessel pages classify the ship itself, so a converted carrier acting as an FSRU appears as a vessel with that type. The two views can both be true at once: a floating terminal is a terminal in one dataset and a ship in another, and we link the two rather than picking one.
That matters when reading capacity figures. An FSRU chartered to a terminal contributes its send-out capacity to that country’s import total while the charter lasts, and takes it away when it leaves. Import capacity built on charters is more mobile than the same number of tonnes built in concrete.
Where each one is chosen
Onshore terminals dominate where demand is large, long-lived and predictable: the major importers of north-east Asia and the established European hubs. FSRUs dominate where demand is new, urgent, seasonal or uncertain, which in practice has meant emerging importers and, more recently, European countries replacing pipeline supply at speed.
The interesting cases are the ones that convert. A country often starts with an FSRU to establish demand and prove the market, then builds onshore capacity once volumes justify it, releasing the vessel back into the charter market. Reading a country page here, an FSRU is usually a sign of a market in motion rather than a settled one. Our country pages show both the terminals and the fleet flagged or owned there, which is often where that story is visible.