LNG

Sakhalin Energy, the operator of the Sakhalin II LNG plant in the Russian Far East supplying four North Asian nations, has started scheduled maintenance at infrastructure facilities and is hopeful of having minimum disruption to exports despite changing loading arms.

“Around 2,500 technical staff from various regions of Russia will be engaged in operations at the facilities,” explained Roman Dashkov, Chief Executive of Sakhalin Energy.

“As part of the shutdown, for the first time in Russia, there will be a replacement of loading arms performed at the LNG jetty of the liquefaction plant,” said the CEO.

The Sakhalin plant has been on stream since 2009 and last year prodcued 10.8 million tonnes of lNG.

However, the joint venture run by Russian natural gas company Gazprom has yet to progress on construction of a long-promised third liquefaction Train at Prigorodnoye on Sakhalin Island.

The main shareholders in the plant are Gazprom with 50 percent, Royal Dutch Shell with 27.5 percent and Japanese company Mitsui & Co. and Mitsubishi with 12.5 percent and 10 percent respectively.

In the past year the Japanese have taken delivery of 51.6 percent of Sakhalin volumes, a further 17.4 percent was shipped to Taiwan, 16.3 percent to South Korea and 14.1 percent to China.

Since the start-up of the plant, Sakhalin Energy has produced and shipped about 130 million tonnes of LNG as of early May 2021 and more than 2,000 cargoes.

The company said that the Russian plant had already begun the maintenance campaign on the PA-B plant, the largest oil and gas production platform of the Sakhalin project.

The PA-B platform is located about 12 kilometres offshore the northeast of the island in waters depths of 32 metres.

“At the platform, it is intended to perform an annual purging of the hydrocarbon multiphase flow separation vessels, a repair of the produced water filters, maintenance of two gas compressors, including a gearbox inspection at one of them, and a number of other maintenance tasks,” explained the company.

The workers would then proceed with the scheduled shutdown of the facilities in the integrated gas chain, including the LUN-A platform.

The Sakhalin maintenance programme is expected to be completed by the start of July.

US liquefied natural gas exports decreased to six vessels in the past week because of hurricane disruption, though this was offset by higher natural gas and LNG indicators in Europe and Asia to help move future cargoes into profitable territory.

UK and Continental European natural gas prices and US Gulf Coast LNG futures have jumped to summer season highs, while US domestic natural gas prices have been boosted by a forecast July heatwave to boost cooling demand.

Oil prices partially recovered after two days of turmoil as US crude futures stayed in positive territory but the North Sea Brent oil price was weak amid the supply glut, also shared with the LNG market as the Asian spot price dropped.

Increasing and new liquefied natural gas production from US and Australian liquefaction and export plants met lukewarm Asia-Pacific demand growth and with no other viable outlet spot LNG shipments were sold at a discount into European terminals, something that is forecast to be repeated this year.

The Southeast Asian nation of Myanmar is making progress in constructing a liquefied natural gas import terminal to support a regional power plant project backed by a Chinese company.

Indian liquefied natural gas imports surged for an eighth month in the current fiscal year as more volumes were imported at a lower cost from countries like Qatar, the US, Australia and West African nations such as Nigeria and Angola.