LNG

Enagás, the Spanish gas grid and terminals operator, is set to begin the second phase of the capacity allocation process, or open season, after interest expressed by 16 trading companies for Spain’s El Musel liquefied natural gas re-loading facility in northern Spain set aside for the European Union.

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.

Fluxys Belgium, the national gas grid company and operator of the Zeebrugge LNG import terminal, increased revenues and profits and said its infrastructure was used particularly intensively by customers to support security of supply in Germany and the Netherlands.

Gaztransport and Technigaz, the French technology designer of LNG maritime and onshore storage systems, has confirmed it has doubled up on tank orders from the top liquefied natural gas import project in China by receiving a similar scale of an order from the leading export venture in Russia.

GTT said it received an order from the South Korean shipyard Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering for the tank design of two floating storage units (FSUs), the largest such facilities ever built, on behalf of GTLK, the Russian state leasing agency.

Each FSU will have a capacity of 361,600 cubic metres and will be fitted with the No. 96 GW membrane cryogenic containment system, a technology developed by GTT.

The Paris-based company said their delivery is scheduled for the end of 2022.

These two FSUs will be located in the Murmansk region and in the Bay of Kamchatka in respectively the West and East of the Russian Federation.

They will be employed in the Arctic LNG II project of the Russian LNG producer and natural gas company Novatek for its trans-shipment ventures.

GTT in late June 2020 also received an order for China’s largest ever LNG storage tanks for the Nangang import terminal proposed for Tianjin City, east of Beijing.

GTT said its order came from the building company China Huanqiu Contracting & Engineering Co. (HQC) for the design of two membrane full-containment LNG tanks, each with net capacity of 220,000 cubic metres.

This order follows the agreement signed in November 2019 between GTT and the Chinese major state-owned company Beijing Enterprises Group, on the occasion of the presidential visit to China of French President Emmanuel Macron, in the presence of Chinese President Xi Jinping.

The Nangang terminal is being developed by Beijing Gas Group, giving the port city area of three import facilities to guarantee energy supply security to the Chinese capital.

The Chinese import terminal will have an initial 5 million tonnes per annum of capacity and adds to the supply available from Sinopec’s Tianjin North import terminal and the floating storage and regasification unit capacity deployed in recent years by China National Offshore Oil Corp.

Beijing Gas is mainly engaged in city-gas distribution and supplies more than 10 billion cubic metres per annum to the Chinese capital and surrounding areas.

The new Tianjin terminal project has already been approved by the National Development and Reform Commission.

Beijing Gas said its terminal in Tianjin was expected to be completed by 2022 and would include emergency reserves comprising 10 extra storage tanks.

The liquefied natural gas import terminal at Dunkirk on the French Channel Coast has opened its truck-loading bay as small-scale LNG and fuel usage increases in Europe.

“Ship owners and haulage companies as well as remote industry increasingly choose LNG as alternative low emission fuel. Their supply can now be sourced from the Dunkirk LNG terminal,” said the French Dunkerque LNG operating company .

Following its commercial entry into service, the newly commissioned truck-loading bay at the Dunkirk terminal offers a loading capacity of 3,000 slots per year.

The Dunkirk import facility is owned and operated by Dunkerque LNG, a company 61 percent held by a consortium including Belgian gas infrastructure group Fluxys, as well as funds such as AXA Investment Managers on behalf of its clients and France’s Crédit Agricole Assurances.

A further 39 percent is owned by a consortium of South Korean investors led by IPM Group in cooperation with Samsung Asset Management.

Juan Vazquez, Chief Executive of Dunkerque LNG, said he was delighted with the start-up of services for the trucking industry.

“This project has successfully come to fruition through our collaboration with the Port of Dunkirk, one of our main partners in the development of this new service,” explained Vazquez.

“With a capacity of almost 2,000 loading slots available between now and the end of the year, our first bay is ready to welcome customers,” stated the CEO.

The company said the service was straightforward and trucking customers can book loading slots online 24/7.

“After online training, drivers can fully autonomously load LNG in just one hour and 30 minutes thanks to a flow rate of 50 cubic metres per hour,” said Dunkerque LNG.

“The increasing demand for cleaner energy in maritime and road transport as well as in the industrial sector has brought LNG to the forefront as an attractive alternative due to its low emission profile,” added the company.

The terminal is located alongside Dunkirk's Western Harbour and began importing cargoes in 2016.

The jetty is large enough to enable the unloading and reloading of the largest LNG carriers up to 266,000 cubic metres capacity and it has three tanks. each with 200,000 cubic metres of storage.

Belgian natural gas network company Fluxys posted its regulated earnings showing that trans-shipments from the Russian Yamal LNG plant in Siberia had transformed the business of the Zeebrugge import terminal and an agreement with Qatar had sealed a bright future.

Fluxys Belgium said that the Zeebrugge import terminal had formally started its long-term trans-shipment contract with the Russian Yamal export plant in Russia with the loading of the 155,000 cubic metres capacity carrier “Yenisei River” from the newly commissioned fifth storage tank.

Mitsui Osk Lines, the Japanese shipping company led by President and Chief Executive Junichiro Ikeda and with an operating fleet of almost 100 liquefied natural gas carriers, has set out its future goals after a past year of LNG successes.

Novatek, the Russian operator of the Yamal liquefied natural gas plant at Sabetta in northern Siberia, said it was in talks to trans-ship its cargoes from Norway or the Russian port of Murmansk because it is unsure of the impact of US sanctions on the Chinese COSCO tankers it uses or US-listed shipping line Teekay LNG.

Fluxys LNG, the operator of the Zeebrugge import terminal in Belgium, said it intended to launch a subscription window in the second half of April for unloading slots and additional storage services at the facility.