Ukraine eyes Canadian LNG

Ukraine's national gas company has agreed to purchase LNG and green hydrogen from Quebec, Canada, in a deal with Canadian energy developer Symbio Infrastructure, the companies said on June 10.

The two sides signed a memorandum of understanding on June 5 in Washington, DC, under which LNG and liquid hydrogen will be delivered to an import terminal in a European transit country. Ukraine lacks regasification capacity, but has been receiving LNG indirectly in recent years via Poland's Swinoujscie import terminal.

Through its subsidiary GNL Quebec, Symbio is developing Energie Saguenay LNG, which it says will be the world's first large-scale carbon neutral LNG facility, with a capacity of 10.5mn metric tons/year. Symbio will "provide the world's lowest carbon LNG to Europe thanks to Canada's stringent regulatory standards for natural gas production and the innovative use of renewable hydroelectricity to power its facilities," the company said.

The gas it provides to Naftogaz will also be competitively-priced, it said, owing to the short shipping distance and cost efficiencies as a result of Canada's cold climate.

Symbio hopes to launch the Energie Saguenay facility in 2027, although first it must overcome regulatory hurdles. Quebec's government refused to approve the project in July last year, over environmental concerns. Earlier this year, federal environment minister Steven Guilbeault and the federal cabinet, acting on a 271-page report from the federal Impact Assessment Agency of Canada (IAAC) that said Energie Saguenay LNG would have "significant direct and cumulative impacts" on marine mammals and "significant effects" related to  greenhouse gas emissions, said those impacts could not justify approving the project.

In June 2021, ahead of the provincial rejection, Symbol enlisted Germany's Siemens Energy to provide engineering services to Energie Saguenay LNG and reduce the project's environmental footprint.

Symbio is free to resubmit the project to provincial and federal regulatory authorities, but a redesigned project would have to go through the assessment process again. The original federal assessment began in 2016 and ended six years later.

Meantime, the Gazoduq pipeline project, which would have supplied Energie Saguenay with natural gas from western Canada, is stalled before the IAAC. The last activity on the file, according to a search of IAAC records, was in July 2020, when a cooperation plan for the development of an impact assessment report was filed.