The U.S. Department of Energy on Wednesday awarded Southern California Telephone & Energy a license to export LNG from its proposed plant on Monkey Island in Cameron Parish to free trade agreement countries.

Greg Michaels, SCT&E’s chairman and CEO, said Wednesday that the company’s FTA license will allow them to export up to 12 million metric tons of LNG to countries such as Israel, Australia, Colombia and South Korea for a 30-year period.

“I just wrote a letter to the DOE telling them it’s a great time of the year to get a gift,” Michaels said.

SCT&E executives initially applied for their FTA license in June to export 4 million metric tons from the Monkey Island site. They rescinded their application shortly thereafter when the company decided to expand the project’s scope from four trains to six, tripling the size of the facility.

The company then reapplied in July for an FTA license to export 12 million metric tons, Michaels said.

SCT&E executives in July applied for DOE’s non-FTA export license, which is still pending with the department. Non-FTA licenses allow companies to export LNG to countries such as Japan, India, Taiwan and the European nations.

Michaels said he did not know when the department would make a decision on the non-FTA license.

SCT&E has not yet made a formal application with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Last month, Michaels said he hopes to send the project’s application to FERC by November.

Earlier this year, DOE officials said they would no longer issue conditional approvals for their non-FTA license. Instead, the department would wait for LNG companies to receive approval from FERC before they would issue the license.

In May, SCT&E announced it had acquired more than 230 acres on Monkey Island to build its LNG plant. The man-made island lies along the Calcasieu Ship Channel just three miles from the Gulf of Mexico.

The Southern California Telephone & Energy LNG proposal is one of four new LNG plants federal regulators are considering for the ship channel area. Also under consideration are Magnolia LNG, Venture Global LNG’s Calcasieu Pass project and Waller Marine Inc.’s Waller Point LNG.

The estimated $9.2 billion project is expected to create about 2,000 construction jobs. Work on the project is expected to begin by the fall of 2016.(Special to the American Press)