The floating LNG import terminal in Mukran in the German part of the Baltic Sea achieved in the second quarter record-high gas deliveries for Germany’s gas grid, the terminal operator Deutsche ReGas said in a statement.
That’s a stark turnaround from the first quarter of the year, when the Mukran terminal was estimated to have operated at just 5% capacity, per Reuters calculations.
Until the end of the first quarter, there have been concerns that the LNG terminals in Germany and France have sat idle for months due to high operating costs.
For the second quarter, Mukran was the top-performing German LNG import terminal, Deutsche ReGas said.
“In the past quarter, we proved the efficiency of our terminal and fed more natural gas into the German grid on behalf of our customers than any other LNG import terminal in Germany,” Deutsche ReGas CEO Ingo Wagner commented.
The gas received and processed at the terminal is fed to the German gas grid via fixed, freely allocable capacities, while a smaller fixed capacity is available for export to the Czech Republic.
Germany has installed several floating LNG import terminals since 2022—to make Europe’s biggest economy “independent of Russian gas”.
Until the middle of 2022, Germany received most of its gas from Russia via Nord Stream 1 before Russia axed deliveries in early September 2022, claiming an inability to repair gas turbines because of the Western sanctions. The sabotage on Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 occurred at the end of the same month.
After the Russian gas supply stopped, Norway is Germany’s top natural gas supplier, and supplies are coming via pipelines.
Europe’s biggest economy plans to have as much as 70.7 million tons per year of LNG import capacity by 2030, which will make it the fourth-largest LNG import capacity holder in the world. Germany plans to have a total of 10 FSRUs, some of which will be removed and replaced by onshore regasification facilities once they are built.
By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com
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