LNG

Jan 13 (LNGJ) - TotalEnergies said an official inauguration ceremony would be held on Saturday, January 14, for the floating LNG import terminal at the Baltic port of Lubmin and attended by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to mark commissioning. The floating storage and regasification unit (FSRU), the “Neptune”, was chartered from TotalEnergies by the Lubmin project developers, a private company called Deutsche ReGas GmbH.

   “The vessel has an annual regasification capacity of 5 billion cubic metres of gas, enough to cover about 5 percent of German demand,” said the French major. “Following Deutsche ReGas’s open season procedure in October 2022 TotalEnergies also contracted regasification capacity of 2.6 Bcm per year and began to deliver LNG from its global integrated portfolio to the Lubmin terminal,” added TotalEnergies.

Deutsche ReGas, a private company that has raised financing from Australian investment bank Macquarie Capital, is run by two businessmen from Potsdam near Berlin and said it aimed to import LNG in the next few months at the Baltic port of Lubmin.

Lithuanian fuel company Klaipedos Nafta has invited market participants to book regasification and cargo capacities for the first three months of the coming winter season from October to the end of December 2022.

The Baltic nation’s operator of oil and gas and fuel storage at the Lithuanian port of Klaipeda said the floating LNG terminal would offer a total of 9.66 terawatt hours during the allocation procedure.

The Baltic states of Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia have only one import terminal between them at the Lithuanian port in the form of the 170,000 cubic metres capacity floating storage and regasification unit (FSRU) “Independence”, delivered in 2014 by Norway’s Höegh LNG Holdings.

Höegh LNG has since expressed its intention to sell the FSRU “Independence” to a suitable buyer as Höegh itself was subjected to a corporate overhaul after an internal takeover.

“In order to ensure that the services of the terminal can be used by as many customers as possible, the capacity of the LNG terminal will be allocated,” said Klaipedos Nafta.

The company said that new regulations provide that a single terminal user may not book more than half of the terminal's allocated capacity.

Preferences

“In the event that the supply of terminal capacity exceeds the demand, the capacity shall be allocated on a ‘pro rata’ basis, with preference given to the companies, which have used the services of the LNG terminal in the last three years and are therefore familiar with the operating principles,” explained Klaipedos Nafta.

Later in 2022, Klaipedos Nafta also stated that it planned to offer the market the possibility to book long-term capacity at the LNG terminal from January 2023 for a period of five or 10 years.

The relevant amendments to the regulations for the use of the terminal have been submitted for market consultation.

“One of the technical changes we will follow next year will align the so-called gas year with the calendar year,” explained Jurgita Šilinskaitė-Venslovienė, Head of LNG at Klaipedos Nafta.

“That is why we are currently initiating capacity allocation for a relatively short period of three months,” she added.

“Already in June, we will invite customers to assess the long-term capacity needs of the LNG terminal, for which we are currently making the final preparations,” she concluded.

The Klaipedos Nafta said applications for terminal capacity scan be submitted to the company until the 17th of May at 4:30 PM Lithuanian time.

Joint annual and monthly schedules of LNG cargoes delivered to the terminal will continue to be published and updated on the Klaipedos Nafta website.

“For the gas year, lasting from 1 October 2021 to 30 September 2022, customers have booked a total of 23.9 TWh of Klaipeda terminal capacity,” it added. 

The European Commission has approved a grant of 128 million euros ($145M) to support the expansion of the Polish onshore liquefied natural gas terminal at the Baltic port of Swinoujscie to enable regular future deliveries of US LNG.

The expansion is scheduled to be completed by 2022 and is aimed at helping ensure gas supply security in Poland and the wider Baltic market.

Regasification at the terminal will be increased to handle 5.55 million tonnes per annum of LNG, or 7.5 billion cubic metres of gas.

A second phase of the expansion will be completed by 2023 and includes a third LNG storage tank along with trans-transhipment facilities for rail loading onto ISO containers.

It will include the construction of an additional jetty. This project will be implemented in collaboration with the Szczecin and Swinoujscie Seaports Authority.

The new jetty will enable the provision of small-scale tanker loading and bunkering activities.

Polskie LNG, the terminal operator, has awarded a technical consulting contract to the European engineering company Tractebel, based in Belgium, to help with the terminal expansion programme.

The funding from the European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, comes from the European Regional Development Fund and the Cohesion Fund under the 2014-2020 Infrastructure and Environment Operational Programme, which has among its priorities the improvement of energy security in Europe.

“The project will contribute to ensuring security of gas supplies in Poland and in the Baltic countries by making supplies more diverse and promoting new gas transport routes in the region,” said an EU statement.

Poland's state-controlled oil and gas company is planning to increase its purchases of LNG to 7.5 MTPA, which is 2 MTPA more than the future handling capacity of the Swinoujscie terminal.

This will enable the company to conduct some cargo trading on the international market.

Under two US supply agreements, the Poles will receive 2 MTPA of LNG for 20 years from Sempra Energy’s Port Arthur plant planned for Texas and coming on stream in 2023, as well as volumes from Venture Global’s Calcasieu Pass export facility in Louisiana to be completed in 2022.

The main supplier to Poland is Qatargas under a long-term supply contract that started in 2016.

Russia is set to become a liquefied natural gas importer at the port of Kaliningrad with the expected arrival of the floating storage and regasification unit, the “Marshal Vasilevskiy”, to the Russian enclave bordering Lithuania and Poland.

Poland is on track to receive additional volumes of liquefied natural gas imports from the US under purchase contracts signed by commercial companies, though the Poles would have to boost their regasification and import capacity to enjoy the economic advantages of the Transatlantic shipments.