LNG

Excelerate Energy Inc., the specialist US company for LNG floating storage and regasification projects from South America to the Nordic region and South Asia, reported steady earnings after a quarter marked by further deals in Qatar and Brazil.

Excelerate Energy, the leading US provider of floating LNG import terminals with increased demand from Europe, reported soaring revenues linked to operations in Finland and South America and with an imminent project start in Germany.

Excelerate Energy, the US specialist and a market leader in floating storage and regasfication units (FSRUs), is preparing an initial public offering that will help test the appetite of investors for shares in the natural gas sector of the energy transition.

Excelerate has filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission to debut its shares and will be circulating a prospectus.

Excelerate intends to list its Class A common stock on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the ticker symbol “EE.”

Excelerate is based in The Woodlands in Houston in Texas and is part of a privately held US energy group founded by George Kaiser, owner of the Bank of Oklahoma.

The company has an operating fleet of 10 LNG FSRUs and is the pioneer of over a dozen import projects worldwide.

Execerate has also led the way in ship-to-ship LNG transfers as it started terminal operations in South America, the US, Europe and Asia.

“The number of shares to be offered and the price range for the proposed offering are subject to market conditions and have not yet been determined,” said Excelerate in a statement.

Three banks have been nominated to serve as joint lead book-running managers for the proposed offering, Barclays of the UK and US investment banks J.P. Morgan, and Morgan Stanley.

“The displacement of dirtier fossil fuels and the natural complement of LNG to a fast-growing renewables sector makes flexible floating LNG products, such as those provided by Excelerate, a part of the solution to decarbonization,” the company says.

In its latest terminal project Excelerate will help to stabilize the flow of supplies to Brazil through 2022 with a deal to deploy one of its existing FSRUs to the port of Salvador in the northeast state of Bahia.

Under the agreement with the South American country’s state-owned oil and gas company Petróleo Brasileiro Excelerate’s FSRU “Excelerate Sequoia” will supply up to 700 million cubic feet per day of regasified LNG.

Excelerate Energy, the US pioneer of floating liquefied natural gas import terminals, has completed its 2,000th commercial ship-to-ship transfer of LNG worldwide after completing its latest operation in the Bay of Bengal off Bangladesh.

Excelerate Energy, the US floating LNG import pioneer that employed the most respected woman in the energy sector, the Notre Dame-educated and late Kathleen Eisbrenner, has promoted two more woman senior executives, both of whom have Middle East oil and gas experience.

Brazilian state-controlled energy company Petroleo Brasileiro SA said it had pre-qualified nine bidders, including European-based majors Royal Dutch Shell, BP of the UK and Total of France, for the long-term lease of one of its liquefied natural gas import terminals in the northeast of the country.

The bidding is for a lease on the Bahia LNG terminal site and its associated pipeline in the northeast state of Bahia as well as access to the Brazilian gas market network.

The move by the company, known as Petrobras, is in line with an agreement made with the nation’s antitrust regulator in July 2019 to open up the Brazilian natural gas market to more competition.

“The lease bidding process is in line with the strategy of improving and building a favourable environment for new investors to enter the natural gas sector, while improving capital allocation,” Petrobras said in a statement.

The facility is located at Baía de Todos os Santos in the port city of Salvador and has regasification capacity of 14 million cubic metres per day of natural gas.

Analysts say there was still tremendous scope for increasing natural gas use in Brazil for the energy transition.

Currently natural gas is in third place in the country’s use of primary energy behind oil (46 percent) and hydropower (29 percent).

These three are followed by a growing renewables sector made up mostly of wind and bio-fuels at 8 percent. Coal use is reducing annually and is now down to about 5 percent.

Petrobras did not issue a schedule for the next stages of the bidding process for the Salvador LNG terminal.

Other companies included in the short list to lease the terminal are Spanish major Repsol, floating import terminal pioneer, Excelerate Energy of the US, and Golar Power, a joint venture project of Golar LNG and US equity fund, Stonepeak Infrastructure Partners.

Spanish utility Naturgy also pre-qualified along with the local Brazilian utilities, Bahiagas and Compass Gas and Energy.

Any final lease agreement will not include the 173,400 cubic metres capacity floating storage and regasification unit “Excelerate Experience”, which is currently deployed at Salvador.

However, other infrastructure included in any deal will be the 45-kilometre associated pipeline. It originates at the LNG terminal landfall and has two gas exit points at Sao Francisco do Conde and Sao Sebastiao do Passe.

The Bahia terminal in Salvador is one of three controlled by Petrobras in Brazil.

The two others at Pecem in the northeast state of Ceara and at Guanabara in the state of Rio de Janeiro, which has been idle since 2018.

While Brazil’s three terminals have been significantly under-utilized, Petrobras and the government are just now making efforts to allow third-party access.

In March 2020, the 170,000 cubic metres capacity FSRU “Golar Nanook” became the first independent terminal to begin operating in Brazil for Golar Power in a private project.

The FSRU is deployed in the small northeast Brazilian state of Sergipe as part of gas-fired power plant venture that will enable Brazil to increase its energy security and natural gas use while continuing to expand its development of renewables.

JERA Co. Inc., the  biggest Japanese utility and liquefied natural gas procurement company, said it acquired 22 percent of the outstanding shares in Summit Power International, a generating group operating in Bangladesh and owner of the Asian nation’s second floating LNG import terminal.