<p>Natural gas (NG) is the cleanest fossil fuel used to generate energy worldwide. The process of liquified natural gas (LNG) makes transporting and storing NG much more convenient and straightforward. The LNG receiving station employs an emergency shutdown (ESD) system to immediately turn off the pumps and seal off the leakage area to avoid anything untoward occurring. To identify the root causes of unexpected system failures, fault tree analysis (FTA) is employed in a wide range of systems. In this study, intuitionistic fuzzy sets (IFS) theory has been used to assess the reliability of the ESD-LNG system under uncertain conditions. For this purpose, a novel intuitionistic fuzzy fault tree analysis (IFFTA) has been developed using convex and exponential “AND" type compensatory operators along with the “OR" type operator. The proposed IFFTA applies algebraic <i>t</i>-norm and <i>t</i>-conorm based fuzzy arithmetic operations to compute system intuitionistic fuzzy reliability, while the <i>V</i>-index definition is used to rank the critical basic events in the ESD system. To show the consistency and superiority of the proposed IFFTA method, sensitivity and comparative analyses have also been conducted. The results show that the proposed IFFTA method is flexible and feasible because it uses the concept of compensation.</p>