Greece Joins Gastrade LNG Project

Greek gas supply monopoly Depa has signed a co-operation agreement with Greek utility Gastrade, the company developing an LNG terminal in Alexandroupolis in northern Greece, Depa said October 16. 

The two CEOs – Depa's Theodoros Kitsakos and Gastrade's Konstantinos Spyropoulos – agreed that Depa would contribute to Gastrade's share capital and share in the further commercial development. 

One of the European Union's projects of common interest, the terminal will secure new natural gas for Greek and other markets in southeast Europe, offering new sources and routes of natural gas supply, promoting competition to the benefit of the end consumers, enhancing the security of supply in Greece and the Balkan markets and improving the reliability and flexibility of the Greek National Natural Gas Transmission System and of the regional and trans-European gas networks.

Over the past two years, Depa and Gastrade have met to push forward co-operation on this, at national and EU levels, and to create the optimal setup for its development, construction and operation.

Floating storage and regasification unit operator Gaslog is already a shareholder in GasTrade having bought a 20% stake in February this year and it said early August it would complete the front-end engineering and design (Feed) for the project in the third quarter. Final investment decision is expected early next year. It had not commented on the status of Feed by time of press.

William Powell