Spain’s foreign trade report covering the first two months of 2023 said that natural gas exports from Spain, including LNG and pipeline natural gas, amounted to €628.8 million ($690M) in total to nations like France, Portugal, Italy, Germany and Morocco.
The data showed that this was 194.3 percent higher than the €213.6M of gas exports in the same January and February period of 2022 and before the impact of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on energy markets.
Analysts note that Spain’s natural gas imports by pipeline from Algeria and by LNG carriers in its countrywide network have traditionally resulted in a big deficit in the trade balance for gas.
However, the latest Spanish trade report shows the gas deficit bill for January and February was reduced by €500M.
“The accumulated deficit in the first two months of 2023 stood at €2.54 billion compared with the €3.04Bln it reached in the same period last year,” said the report.
In the first months of 2023, the report showed that almost all of Spanish traded LNG went to Italy and cost €299M and next was Germany with €132.73M of deliveries, Portugal with €32.1M and the Netherlands €23.3M.
Spanish statistics also show that in the first two months of 2023 a total of 12,402.9 gigawatts hours were exported, of which 60.79 percent was transported through gas pipelines and 39. 21 percent in ships as LNG.
By quantity of gas purchased, France leads in this case the list of countries that have purchased the most gas from Spain.
Interconnections
The French imported 4,526.2 GW/h of gas in January and February, followed by Italy (3,284 GW/h), Portugal (1,897.3 GW/h) and Morocco (1,216 GW/h).
Specifically, pipeline gas exports through the interconnections with France broke records in the first two months to exceed 35 terawatt hours (TWh), the equivalent of 3.88 billion cubic metres of natural gas.
In total, through the interconnections with France and Portugal, Spanish exports reached 41 TWh, the highest figure since 2016.
Spain has six LNG import terminals operating and is currently re-launching a seventh previously moth-balled facility. The El Musel terminal in the Port of Gijón is capable of contributing up to 8 Bcm of additional LNG to the European Union’s supply through trans-shipments.
Spanish grid operator Enagás has capacity at six LNG regasification terminals in Spain.
It owns five terminals at Barcelona in the northeast, at Cartagena in the southeast, at Sagunto in the east of Spain, at Huelva in the southwest and the El Musel terminal in the northwest.
Overall in the whole EU, there were also 13.7 Bcm of pipeline natural gas imports in the month of March alone, which was 14 percent higher than the previous month of February, though 39 percent down on March 2022.
So far in 2023, the EU’s cumulative pipeline gas supply for the first three months decreased by 37 percent year-on-year to 38.3 Bcm, driven by falls in imports mostly from Russia, but also due to lower volumes being received from Norway and Algeria, while imports from Azerbaijan on the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline have risen.
