LNG

China LNG Group Ltd., a Hong Kong-based company with assets along the value chain in mainland China, has said its billionaire Chief Executive Dr. Kan Che (Billy Albert) Kin, was stepping down while the company was also changing its name to better reflect its activities.

Japan Petroleum Exploration (Japex), which operates the main LNG import terminal in Japan’s Fukushima Prefecture, is taking its expertise to Vietnam to help develop an LNG receiving terminal in the Vietnamese port city of Haiphong.

Coaxis Energy Company of South Dakota has acquired the liquefied natural gas assets and interests of Kalm Energy, an LNG and compressed natural gas sales and service provider from Nebraska, as the fuel sector expands in North America.

Grupo HAM of Spain, the LNG and gas fuel infrastructure company, said it partnered with Peruvian firm Limagas to build the first LNG and compressed natural gas station in the South American nation of Peru, an LNG exporting nation.

The station is on one of the main avenues of the city of Cuzco, located in the Peruvian Andes.

The service station currently offers its customers CNG and with its two double dispensers and 80 cubic metres LNG tank will soon be filled with fuel.

“The Cuzco CGN-LNG gas station is the first of three planned natural gas stations in Peru, including a second station in Cuzco and another to be opened at Quillabamba during 2021,” said HAM.

With these new projects, HAM continues to help promote the use of LNG and CNG in South America, where its subsidiary HAM Chile was chosen by local Chilean company Empresas Lipigas to design, construct and commissioning the first LNG fuel in Chile.

HAM’s Peruvian project partner Limagas is an affiliate of Empresas Lipigas.

This station will be sited at fuel facilities of Transportes San Gabriel in Linares, 300 kilometres south of the Chilean capital Santiago.

While Chile is an LNG importer, Peru has been an LNG exporter since 2010 with a plant at Pampa Melchorita comprising two liquefaction Trains and annual output of around 4 million tonnes per annum.

HAM said that the Cuzco station is on Avenida la Cultura, which extends from west to east between the districts of Cuzco, Wnachaq, San Sebastián and San Jerónimo, with significant vehicle traffic.

During the station’s inauguration, the authorities of the Regional Government of Cuzco said that having a natural gas filling station changed the nation’s energy matrix and would help lower fuel costs.

HAM now has a network of 75 LNG and CNG stations. They are located mostly in Europe with 30 in Spain, 16 in Italy, 12 in the Netherlands, nine in Belgium and eight in France, all sited at strategic points for truck transport.

China Gas Holdings, one of the leading non-state controlled companies in the Chinese sector involved in city-gas and LNG, has been included in the Hang Seng Shanghai-Shenzhen-Hong Kong 300 Index for growing corporations as it pledged to replace more coal with gas in Northern China.

Polish Oil and Gas has signed a contract with South Korean company LG Chem group to set up a liquefied natural gas regasification facility near its factory in Wroclaw in southwest Poland producing batteries for electric vehicles.

Chart Industries, the US LNG equipment maker, has reported mid-second quarter business activities, including new contracts and expenditure and cash flow details at its four divisions.

Chart said that net cash provided by operating activities for continuing operations amounted to $15.5 million and corresponding free cash flow included capital expenditures of $12.6M, driven by strong earnings, cash collections and supplier terms extensions.

The Atlanta-based company, listed on the Nasdaq global exchange, also completed a five-year long-term agreement with a major industrial gas customer for field services and repairs.

Chart said it signed an agreement with Risco Energy Solutions to provide LNG equipment to support the rapidly growing gas-to-power infrastructure in the Asian nation of Indonesia.

“April earnings per share and adjusted earnings per share after adding back severance costs were very strong, as our non-energy related businesses have continued to perform,” stated Jill Evanko, Chart’s President and Chief Executive.

“While the pandemic has altered 2020 for everyone, we are focused on shaping our business to deliver good results in 2020 and position Chart to take advantage of the strong fundamentals of the clean energy transition,” she added.

It also booked orders with 67 new customers in April and May and executed $11.9M of additional cost reductions on May 29, 2020, bringing year-to-date total annualized cost reductions to $60.7M.

“While the current economic situation continues to be challenging for our oil-related product lines, we continue to see demand for our equipment and solutions related to the transition to clean energy infrastructure and our specialty markets,” said Chart.

“With over $60M of cost reductions taken year-to-date, we continue to expect margin expansion throughout 2020 and strong free cash flow for the year, with debt paydown a priority,” it added.

Company free cash flow in April 2020 amounted to $12.6M.

“In the past two months, we have achieved payment term extensions with 311 suppliers with an average payment term extension of 38 days (new payment terms for those suppliers average 89 days)’” stated Chart.

The company second quarter orders through May 29 totaled about $135M, with orders in-house that will be booked in the first days of June totaling an additional $14M.

“In April and May, we received orders from 67 new customers, including 20 in China, where quarter-to-date orders and sales have exceeded our original 2020 plan,” stated the company.

Chart additionally reported demand for oxygen-related critical care products was strong in the month of April and in the first two weeks of May, while activity for traditional industrial gas applications has increased in the second half of May as the hyper-focus on oxygen delivery has subsided to pre-COVID-19 levels.

“We continue to see consistent and strong quoting and order levels for fueling stations, repair and service, small-scale LNG infrastructure and specialty markets, including the receipt of a $2.3M order for a European country’s Armed Forces,” the company revealed.

“We also expect to receive a small-scale terminal order in North America in June 2020,” it added.

In the E&C Cryogenics division, demand for quick turn refurbishment, repair and service-related product and services has increased over the past eight weeks, with orders of $7.2M associated with this type of work.

“Venture Global’s Calcasieu Pass big LNG project continues on schedule, and in May, we booked an additional $1M order related to the project,” said the company.

Chart said that areas that softened in the first two months of the second quarter 2020 included HLNG vehicle tanks, beverage tanks, and air-cooled heat exchangers.

“Air cooled heat exchanger orders quarter-to-date total $12.1M while the fans business continues to book and ship consistent with first quarter levels,” said the company.

Chart noted that the support of governments for the transition to clean energy fuels has heightened, with India extending excise duties on diesel, and Germany expected to extend the toll exemption for LNG heavy duty trucks on German highways in early June which will continue to incentivize companies to build infrastructure, including LNG fueling stations and additional over-the-road LNG trucks.

The company has also previously announced a letter of intent from Shell for 7 fueling stations in Germany and in May 2020, received the first purchase order for 2 of the 7 stations plus a surprise four station order that has not yet been booked from another customer.

Chart said that other regions, in particular Southeast Asia, continue to address their need for power infrastructure.

“One such country is Indonesia, and early in the second quarter 2020, we signed an agreement with Risco Energy Solutions, a private investment company, to provide LNG equipment such as Storage Tanks, ISO containers, Trailers, Mobile Equipment, and Fueling Stations, to support the rapidly growing Indonesian gas-to-power infrastructure needs,” it said.
Risco is an active gas infrastructure provider to PT Perta Gas Niaga, a subsidiary of the oil and gas company Pertamina.

“Given the weak demand for air-cooled heat exchangers and the continued optimization of our cost structure, we took further reductions on May 29, 2020,” said Chart.

The total cost reductions taken equaled $11.9M in annualized cost savings, bringing the year-to-date total to $60.7M of annualized cost savings.

“Of the $60.7M, approximately $51M are structural changes that can be maintained at volume levels above $1.6 billion,” the company stated.

Calor, the UK's leading retail supplier of liquefied natural gas and liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) with 350,000 commercial customers located off the main gas grid, is building up its loading volumes from National Grid Plc’s import terminal on the Isle of Grain in Kent.

Calor has just announced the loading of its 1,200th LNG truck, which equates to more than 24,000 tonnes of LNG, supplied across the length and breadth of the UK.

“The truck-loading facility on the Isle of Grain, which is located 43 miles east of London, opened in 2015, and Calor was the first LNG supplier to load and deliver to its extensive UK LNG customer base, which ranges from large off-grid industrial applications (including food & beverage and pharmaceutical) to vehicle refuelling, to name a few,” said Calor.

Grain LNG also offers reloads, trans-shipments and other services such as reloading road tankers and ISO containers.

The National Grid subsidiary additionally has plans for a marine breakbulk facility.

Mark Gilks, Calor LNG National Account Manager, said his company was committed to delivering fuel to its customers, especially throughout the current crisis as the UK uses cleaner and greener fuel sources.

“By using LNG instead of more polluting fuels such as oil and diesel derivatives, we have helped UK businesses cut their CO2 emissions by up to 25 percent over the past five years, based on the loadings from the Isle of Grain alone,” said Gilks.

“LNG-powered trucks have comparable performance to diesel vehicles in terms of power, acceleration and cruising speed, but can cut CO2 by between 10 percent and 20 percent, dependeing on duty cycle and vehicle type,” he added.

“LNG also takes up 600 times less space than conventional natural gas making it easy to transport and store compactly in its liquid form,” stated Gilks.

The Calor executive said that the company was grateful to its operational team who have kept on going, particularly over the last few months.

“We’re incredibly proud of what we have achieved and keen to see where the next five years will take us, as we do our bit to promote the use of cleaner energy sources nationwide,” explained Gilks.

The Isle of Grain facility is the largest import terminal in Europe. It has also just launched the second phase of an on-going open season during which the market is invited to make bids with less than a month before the deadline.

Grain LNG is offering up to 300 gigawatt hours per day (7.2 million tonnes per annum of LNG) of redelivery capacity and 380,000 cubic metres of associated storage, to be made available from mid-2025.

An expansion will increase the size of the terminal, situated on the Thames-Medway estuary, to about 1.2 million cubic metres.

Clean Energy Fuels Corp., the LNG and compressed natural gas filling station company with a network of 550 stations across the US and Canada and partly owned by French major Total, has signed multiple station expansion and supply contracts to accommodate demand for ultra-low carbon fuel for trucks and buses.

Liqvis GmbH, the liquefied natural gas fuel subsidiary of German utility Uniper, has opened its second LNG filling station near the city of Kassel on the A7 motorway and another seven are being constructed or planned.

Trucking companies in Germany do not have to pay motorway tolls if they have natural gas fuel and Liqvis said the exemption was proving effective in getting companies to switch from the more pollutant diesel.

The latest station in the state of Hesse in central Germany adds to the first one previously opened in Grünheide near Berlin.

Liqvis, based in the German city of Essen, said the Kassel station on the A7 between the Kassel-Mitte interchange and the Kassel-Süd triangle was built in just about four months and is open 24 hours a day.

Kassel previously had a mobile station to dispense LNG and that is now being moved from Kassel to Hamm in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia to expand the LNG fuel network.

“The Kassel location in the centre of Germany made the site a hotspot for long-haul heavy trucks, as previously demonstrated by the high demand at the mobile station,” said Liqvis.

“The new station will make refueling faster and more convenient for customers,” the company added.

“Two trucks can now be refueled at the same time, and in the future this could even be increased to four,” explained Liqvis.

The Uniper unit’s LNG station network will also spread into other European Union countries, including France with a facility at the Channel port of Calais.

The Calais station is already under construction and among other sites chosen for stations in Germany are Rosengarten near Hamburg and Langenhagen near Hanover.

“Thanks in no small part to the toll exemption in Germany, LNG has established itself as a fuel on the market over the last three years, which can be seen in the large increase in revenue at our filling stations,” said Silvano Calcagno, Managing Director of Liqvis.

“At Liqvis, we want transport companies to be able to plan the use of their vehicles as flexibly as possible,” added Calcagno.

“That's why we're continually working on expanding our network coverage and I am looking forward to being able to open further stations in Germany and Europe over the course of this year,” he stated.

The main advantages of truck companies switching to LNG are emissions well below the Euro VI standard and less noise from the engines.

“The ‘quiet’ LNG engine technology lowers noise levels for deliveries outside normal traffic times,” said Liqvis.

“In addition, by switching to LNG, operators can refuel their vehicles with a larger amount of natural gas, meaning that their fleets can travel longer distances,” it added.