Before dawn on June 8 last year, workers at the sprawling Freeport liquefied natural gas export plant on the Texas coast heard “strange” noises emanating from some of its pipes. They notified their bosses but a follow-up inspection found nothing amiss. Then came a fireball.

The explosion at Freeport LNG knocked out a centrepiece of the US gas export industry just as the world was looking for more fuel as the war in Ukraine squeezed supplies from Russia. The terminal supplied about 10 per cent of European LNG imports at the time of the explosion.

Eight months later there are now signs that the plant is stirring back to life, taking in gas to condense and load on oceangoing tankers. Yet doubts persist about the operations of the nation’s second-largest such facility.