Gastech is the largest annual meeting of the gas and LNG industry. This year it was held at BITEC in Bangkok from 14 to 17 September, with around a thousand exhibitors and a conference program of some two hundred sessions. It brings together the producers, shipowners, terminal operators, technology companies and financiers who make up the LNG supply chain, and for many of them it is the one week of the year when the whole industry is in the same building.

Myriad had three reasons to be there. Our CEO, James Thompson, moderated a session in the Low Carbon Solutions Programme. Energos Infrastructure, whom we support as their marketing and communications agency, exhibited with a stand and a film we produced. And Padah LNG, exhibiting at Gastech for the first time, showed a 3D animation we made of their project in Nigeria.

James moderated Decarbonising Power, LNG and Data Centres, part of the Technical and Commercial Conference. He stepped in after the scheduled moderator, Rakhi Oli, Managing Partner at One Step Advisors, was unable to attend. The session dealt with a question the whole industry is now facing. Electricity demand is rising fast, AI data centres are adding to it, and no single technology can supply that power while also cutting emissions. Four speakers presented four different approaches.

Matt Davidsaver, CCS Product Champion at GE Vernova, presented Net Zero Teesside, a first-of-a-kind gas power and carbon capture project in the UK that has taken FID and is under construction. Tamás Ungár, Solutions and Proposal Manager at Capsol Technologies, explained how simple cycle peaking turbines can be retrofitted with carbon capture and run as low-carbon baseload plants. Dr Maulik Shelat, SVP of Innovation at 8 Rivers Capital, presented direct-fired supercritical CO2 power cycles, which generate power, capture the CO2 and recover waste heat in one system. Abdoul Razac Sane, Strategy and Ecosystem Lead at TotalEnergies OneTech, presented hybrid solar, thermal and electric systems for cutting emissions at LNG plants.

James closed with the same question to each speaker. If the panel met again at Gastech in 2030, which of these solutions would have reached commercial scale, and what would have to happen first? The answers had less to do with the technology than with cost, permitting and who is willing to move first. The session ran to time and there were more questions from the audience than the schedule allowed.

Across the hall, Energos Infrastructure had one of the busier stands in the floating LNG section. Energos owns and operates nine floating storage and regasification units, known as FSRUs, within a fleet of thirteen vessels, with funds managed by Apollo as the majority owner. An FSRU takes LNG from a carrier at sea, turns it back into gas on board and sends it directly into a country’s gas grid. It does the job of an onshore import terminal without the years of onshore construction, and the vessels currently work in Europe, Asia and the Americas.

We have supported Energos for nearly a year as their sole marketing and communications agency. For Gastech that meant designing the stand graphics, producing the media that played on the stand and providing communications support through the week. The aim was simple: show Energos as a global operator in the FSRU market, not a shipping company with a few vessels.

The main event on the stand was an epic film made to run continuously, with or without sound. It was built from footage gathered over the course of the year, wherever the fleet happened to be. In Turkey, Energos Eskimo was filmed leaving the shipyard with a fresh coat of paint and sailing out through the Dardanelles on her way back to Egypt. In Egypt, a crew worked at the Port of Sukhna with drones and ground cameras, covering Energos Eskimo and Energos Power at work and interviewing Captain Devendra Kumar, who runs operations there, on deck. In Indonesia, Nusantara Regas Satu was filmed from the air in Jakarta Bay. Arthur Regan, Chief Executive Officer, was interviewed at the company’s offices in Stamford to carry the story between them.

The reason for going to those lengths is that an FSRU is very hard to picture if you have never seen one. They are as long as three football pitches, they operate offshore or at a remote berth, and the people who need to understand them, such as ministers, regulators and lenders, rarely get near one. Aerial footage does in a few seconds what printed graphics cannot: it shows the size of the vessel and the place it works. On a stand, that is the difference between a visitor walking past and a visitor stopping. Energos were pleased with how the film was received.

Padah LNG FZE was at Gastech for the first time, and we were the partner they chose to bring their project to the stand. Padah is developing an LNG liquefaction and export terminal at Eastern Obolo in Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria. Nigeria is a new area of investment for the company, and Gastech was the first time the project had been presented to the international market.

The terminal does not yet exist, so the animation had to stand in for it. Working from the project’s own engineering model, our 3D team produced an animation of the facility as it is designed, so that what visitors saw on the stand matched the drawings. The film is one continuous camera move, about ninety seconds long. It arrives from the sea at first light, follows the jetty in, rises through the storage tanks, travels the length of the liquefaction trains and finishes on a high view of the whole site. It then returns to the opening shot without a cut, so that it loops on the stand and a visitor can join at any point and still see the full project.

The timetable was short. Padah confirmed the work in late July and the finished film was tested on the stand the day before the exhibition opened, about six weeks later. It was delivered on time and on budget, and it played throughout the four days.

Gastech is a difficult place to be understood. Most of what is on show is either thousands of miles away or has not been built yet, and every visitor has a hundred other stands to see. Film and animation are how that distance gets closed, and Bangkok was a good week for both.

Next is ADIPEC in Abu Dhabi in November.