LNG

Novatek, the Russian natural gas company and operator of the Yamal LNG export plant and developer of the delayed Arctic LNG II venture, has reported positive operating data for the second quarter of 2024 amid continued Western sanctions.

A German onshore LNG import terminal project has formally started construction using Spanish regasification terminal expertise at Stade, on the Elbe Estuary between Hamburg and Cuxhaven.

The project called the Hanseatic Energy Hub has just held a ground-breaking ceremony at the site of the project and attended by executives of the venture and politicians

Enagás, the Spanish LNG terminal owner, is backing the Stade LNG terminal along with the Hamburg-based terminals and storage company, the Buss Group GmbH along with the main customer, the multinational Dow chemicals group. Another shareholder si the Partners Group infrastructure fund.

The Hanseatic Hub event speakers included the Chief Minister of the German state of Lower Saxony, Stefan Weil, and Jozef Síkela, the Minister of Industry and Trade of the Czech Republic, a member of the 27-nation European Union that will hold regasification capacity at the German facility.

“Following the first floating LNG terminal, Germany’s first land-based liquefied natural gas terminal is now also being built in Lower Saxony,” said Weil in reference to the Wilhelmshaven floating terminal on the state’s North Sea Coast.

Federal role

“Our federal state is playing a key role in the expansion of infrastructure to import energy,” said Lower Saxony Minister Weil.

The statement continued that besides the two German energy and utility companies, EnBW and SEFE GmbH, which have respectively booked annual capacities of 6 billion cubic metres and 4 Bcm at the Stade terminal, so has the Czech energy company ČEZ, which has secured long-term import rights for 2 Bcm per annum.

Czech Minister Síkela said his country was looking forward to receiving its own LNG supplies via the Stade onshore terminal.

“We are constantly working to ensure the best possible future for our energy industry in the Czech Republic,” Síkela explained.

“Capacities for importing LNG from overseas are also an essential part of all this. After securing capacity in the floating LNG terminal in the Netherlands, we also managed last autumn in cooperation with ČEZ to secure capacity in the first German land-based terminal, Stade,” he added.

Czech energy security

“In three years it will contribute to covering up to a third of today's Czech consumption. Thanks to the convenient location, the terminal can also contribute to the reduction of fees for transporting gas to the Czech Republic,” Síkela stated.

Jan Themlitz, Chief Executive of the Hanseatic Hub project at Stade said that “after six years of planning and permitting”, the construction phase has now started.

“Privately initiated and funded we are benefiting from the vast experience of our shareholders. Partners Group is one of the largest private investors in the infrastructure sector and Enagás, Europe’s leading LNG-terminal operator, will be assuming operational responsibility and is teaming up with Dow, the ideal industrial partner on the site in Stade,” said Themlitz.

“As an initiator, the Buss Group has also played a key role in driving the project forward and bringing the shareholder-team together,” the CEO added.

Spanish role

Técnicas Reunidas, the Madrid-based engineering company, will provide Spanish expertise in leading the construction consortium for the terminal with completion set for 2027.

A Spaniard, Alejandro Marjalizo, has additionally been appointed as the Chief Technical and Operations Officer of the project and is a member of the Hansiatic Hub Management Board, reporting directly to CEO Themlitz.

Marjalizo previously worked at Enagás as an electrical engineer in 2007 and has focused on LNG since 2011.

Over the past 13 years, he has worked as a project engineer and as a project manager at LNG terminals in multiple locations, including at the Spanish terminals at Huelva, Cartagena and Barcelona as well as Altamira in Mexico.

Germany is also building a second onshore LNG terminal at Brunsbüttel in the state of Schleswig-Holstein, north of Hamburg, and where existing floating regasification services are currently operating.

HAM Group of Spain, the developer of a growing European LNG filling station network and with other stations opened in South America, has inaugurated another facility on the Andalusia regional highway.

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.

Novatek, the Russian natural gas company and operator of the Yamal LNG export plant and developer of Arctic LNG II currently still under threat from Western sanctions imposed because of the Ukraine invasion, has reported operating data for the first quarter of 2023 as it continued to supply cargoes to the European Union.

The National Oil Corporation (NOC) of Libya, a former LNG exporter, has announced that the Mellitah Oil and Gas Company, among whose shareholders is Italy’s Eni, had succeeded in returning a Mediterranean offshore natural gas well to production.

Enagás, the Spanish gas grid and LNG terminals operator, has acquired the Reganosa gas pipeline network in Northern Spain while Reganosa is becoming a 25 percent shareholder in the El Musel regasification and import terminal on the Bay of Biscay previously 100-percent owned by Enagás.

Enagás, Spain’s natural gas grid and LNG network operator, reported slight declines in 2022 net profits and revenues after a year of high volatility in the energy markets with the Spanish Gas System operating without halt and Enagás infrastructure helping maintain the security of supply of the European Union.

German Chancellor Helmut Scholz has led an inauguration ceremony for the nation’s first LNG floating storage and regasification unit (FSRU), the “Höegh Esperanza”, at the North Sea port of Wilhelmshaven.

Spanish energy company Repsol said the first terminal in Spain to supply liquefied natural gas as marine fuel was growing its customer base and a second LNG bunkering facility in the same region was under development.