Spain increased its imports of Russian liquefied natural gas in 2022 despite Western sanctions over the invasion of Ukraine and with only the UK out of leading European importers voluntarily ending LNG cargo deliveries from Russia and later joined by the Baltic nation of Lithuania.
Spain, France, the Netherlands have continued to receive LNG cargoes, which are not on the formal Western sanctions list.
The shipments to Spain and other European Union nations mostly come from the Yamal LNG export plant in northeast Siberia and operated by Russian natural gas company Novatek.
Latest Spanish data showed that 12.6 percent of Spanish natural gas was imported from Russia in the form of LNG and regasified to enter the state gas grid or re-exported to other EU nations.
With the start of the war in Ukraine in February 2022, energy supplies from Russia collapsed with oil accounting for just 1 percent of Spanish imports and with only LNG surviving as a seemingly essential Russian commodity.
Regarding LNG imports, the data showed that Spain received 56,021 gigawatt hours (GWh), or 4.24 million tonnes, of LNG from Russia in 2022, which was 54.8 percent more than in 2021 when it imported 37,027 GWh, or 2.80MT of LNG.
Rise in deliveries
As a consequence, Spain’s share of LNG shipments from the Russians increased by 3.7 percentage points in 2022 from 8.9 percent to 12.6 percent.
The data showed that Russia remained the fourth largest natural gas supplier to Spain after LNG deliveries from the US, pipeline natural gas from Algeria and LNG cargoes from Nigeria.
In the last month of 2022, Russian deliveries from the Yamal plant to northwest Spain and other Spanish ternminals surpassed LNG deliveries from Nigeria and consolidated itself in third place.
This meant that in the month of December, 5,453 GWh, or 414,400 tonnes, of LNG were received by Spain from Russia .
This increased the December cargo volumes of Russia’s LNG received by Spanish terminals to 14.3 percent of the total.
The LNG deliveries contrasted with the shipment of oil cargoes to Spanish refineries.
Russia exported 698,000 tons of crude oil to Spain in 2022, which was 72.8 percent less than in 2021 when 2.6 million tons were received.
In this case, Russia’s share of crude deliveries to Spain fell from 4.6 percent of the total to 1.1 percent.
After this collapse, Russia’s became Spain’s 17th largest oil supplier, down nine places from 2021.
