Japanese commodities major Mitsui is looking for investment opportunities in liquefied natural gas to secure the long-term supply of electricity for the booming data center industry.
The company will be looking for either equity stake acquisitions or offtake agreements, the chief executive of Mitsui said as quoted by Bloomberg. “Without securing energy, it is impossible to implement solutions,” Kenichi Hori told the publication in the context of plans to establish a business entity entirely focused on supplying electricity to the tech industry’s data centers.
In order to secure the supply of this electricity, for which demand is expected to rise significantly on a global level, Mitsui is looking to invest in LNG across the Middle East, Australia, and the United States, the company’s chief executive also told Bloomberg this week.
Mitsui already has a contract with Venture Global for 1 million tons of liquefied gas annually and a stake in the Emirati Ruwais LNG project, which is scheduled to begin production in 2028. It will have a capacity of 7.5 million tons of LNG annually, doubling ADNOC’s total to 15 million tons. Earlier this year, Mitsui was also in talks to acquire a stake in QatarEnergy’s LNG expansion project. This project has now been put on hold because of the war.
Japan is among the most import-dependent countries in the world when it comes to energy due to a lack of sufficient domestic resources. It is a top-three importer of liquefied natural gas, with a lot of that traditionally coming from the Middle East and Australia—it is the country’s largest LNG buyer. Yet the war between the U.S., Israel, and Iran has put in stark relief the vulnerability that this dependence translates into, with Qatari LNG supplies significantly constrained and not about to be restored soon.
This has pushed Japan to switch from LNG to coal, as a lot of other Asian nations have done amid soaring prices for the superchilled fuel.
By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com
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