Half of the cargo will cover the needs of Estonian customers, the other half will remain in Lithuania and Poland
On the order of Eesti Gaas, the Equinor gas tanker Isabella delivered another shipload of liquefied natural gas (LNG) of American origin to Klaipeda terminal in Lithuania. This is already the fourth major LNG based gas delivery with which Eesti Gaas ensures the gas supply of its customers in the upcoming autumn months, according to Eesti Gaas.
“Eesti Gaas entered the LNG business five years ago and become a leading gas seller with LNG competence in the region – our ability to deliver is confirmed by the competition organized for the capacities of the fourth quarter of this year at the Klaipeda terminal, where we were the only gas seller from Estonia, Finland or Latvia to successfully participate and book two slots out of ten,” said Margus Kaasik, Chairman of the Management Board of Eesti Gaas.
“There is plenty of LNG in the world, the bottleneck is too few terminals where it can be unloaded. In addition, we see that countries have begun to intervene in the free market and increasingly protect the interests of their own companies. Estonia must not leave its companies in an unequal situation, neither in the short nor long term. Gas sellers, industries, the entire market are currently monitoring efforts to achieve priority access for Estonian companies to Finland’s Inkoo terminal, the gas supply security and competitiveness of our economy depend on it,” said Kaasik.
The previous three large LNG deliveries, obtained through cooperation with PGNiG, took place in May and June this year. Half of the present cargo will foremost cover the needs of Estonian customers, the other half will remain in Lithuania and Poland. “The supply is divided in this way for the reason that the Lithuanian-Latvian border point does not allow the entire amount of gas to be brought over to Estonia, international connections have their own restrictions,” explains Kaasik. “However, our customers can be calm, because we will bring one more LNG cargo in November, and no one will be without gas,” Kaasik confirms.
In the following days, LNG will be bunkered from the tanker to the Independence floating terminal, from where the gas will flow through pipelines to consumers. Sailing under the Greek flag, Isabella, completed last year, is 295 meters long and 46 meters wide, the tanker can hold 174,130 m3 of liquid gas.
Eesti Gaas started using the small LNG terminal in Klaipeda already in 2017. In 2019, a contract was signed with Klaipeda Nafta, after which LNG has been purchased through the Independence floating terminal and sent to the natural gas network. In addition, Eesti Gaas has been delivering LNG by trucks from different countries for ship bunkering and to off-grid industrial customers for many years.
Eesti Gaas is the largest privately owned energy company in the Finnish-Baltic region. The company offers natural gas to customers in the form of pipeline gas, compressed natural gas (CNG) and liquefied natural gas (LNG), and operates Estonia’s largest gas network. Eesti Gaas is actively engaged in international energy trade, develops a renewable energy portfolio in the form of solar energy and green gas (biomethane) production and sales.
Eesti Gaas operates in Finland, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland under the Elenger brand name. The group’s energy sales volume last year was 12 TWh, more than 70 percent of which came from outside Estonia. The group has a total of 50,000 customers.