Gazprom Delays LNG Bunkering Entry
Gazprom’s Portovaya small-sized LNG plant is now expected to launch operations in 2020 – a year later than first scheduled, the company’s head of directorate Kirill Neuymin revealed in a presentation on October 2.
The plant in the northwest Leningrad region will be capable of producing up to 1.5mn metric tons/year of LNG. In addition to bunkering services, it will also serve as a reserve gas supply source for Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave, Neuymin said at the St Petersburg International Gas Forum.
LNG bunkering is growing rapidly, as shipowners look for cleaner fuels ahead of the introduction of stricter IMO emissions standards next year. Gazprom has been slow to seize on this market opportunity, however. Novatek beat the state giant to become the first Russian company to launch commercial-scale marine LNG bunkering in April, when it commissioned its 660,000 mt/yr Vysotsk LNG facility, also on the Baltic shore.
Gazprom broke ground on its Portovaya plant in 2016. The company has plans to develop two more bunkering sites in Vladivostok in the Far East and on the coast of the Black Sea, Neuymin said.
The 1.5mn mt/yr Vladivostok LNG plant will provide “a significant part” of its capacity to bunkering, he said, noting that a feasibility study on the project had been undertaken. It will primarily target Chinese shipowners as bunkering customers, and will also export LNG cargoes to China. Neuymin said there were “attractive opportunities” in China given its ongoing push to replace coal with gas in power generation.
A decision on building a 0.5-1.5mn mt/yr plant on the Black Sea will be made “hopefully soon,” Neuymin said.
Gazprom appears to have abandoned its previous plan to build a larger 5mn mt/yr LNG terminal in Vladivostok. The newly proposed plant will receive gas from fields off the eastern shore of Sakhalin Island via the Sakhalin-Khabarovsk-Vladivostok (SKV) pipeline. SKV is capable of flowing up to 5.5bn m3/yr of gas but has been underutilised because of limited regional demand. Gazprom hired local service group RusGazDobycha to install extra subsea equipment and drill new wells at the Kirinskoye gas field off Sakhalin earlier this year. The $800mn project is aimed at expanding Kirinskoye’s output from the current 700mn m3 to 5.5bn m3/yr.