Dutch Gate terminal receives two cargoes from Vysotsk terminal in Russia, plans new small-scale project

Dutch Gate terminal in the port of Rotterdam has received two shipments of liquefied natural gas (LNG) from the Novatek-operated mid-scale liquefaction facility in Russia’s Baltic Sea port of Vysotsk.

Novatek launched full-scale production at the Cryogas-Vysotsk project, jointly owned with Gazprombank, in April this year with Novatek’s Mark Gyetvay revealing on Monday that the company could even triple the capacity of the plant.

The 6500-cbm Coral Anthelia brought two LNG cargoes from the Vysotsk facility to Gate “last weekend and the week before… It takes about eight days for a round trip voyage,” Stefaan Adriaens, Commercial Manager at Gate told LNG World News on Wednesday at the sidelines of the Flame conference being held in Amsterdam.

The LNG coming from Vysotsk has been stored into Gate’s tanks, such as the majority of cargoes Gate received this year from Novatek’s giant Yamal LNG project in the Arctic.

The Yamal cargoes have been previously mainly transshipped at Gate to other terminals all around the globe but since the last quarter of the last year, this changed quite a bit, mainly driven by gas prices in Europe.

The reasons behind unloading Yamal and Vystosk volumes in Gate’s tanks is a huge increase in regasification activity at the Dutch first LNG facility.

“Currently we are regasifying at full capacity, the first time in eight years since the facility launched. In April, we regasified 940 million cubic meters and May is so far even higher than April,” Adriaens said.

Gate has currently an annual regasification capacity of 12 Bcm and three storage tanks.

LNG throughput volumes at the Gate facility rocketed in the first quarter of this year, rising 143 percent compared to the same period in 2018.

So far this year, Gate received 58 LNG carriers, of which two were these small-scale unloads from Vysotsk, Adriaens said. The facility also conducted one large LNG transshipment and fifteen small LNG loadings.

Rail tank car small-scale LNG project

Besides working on a feasibility study for the fourth jetty, the second small-scale dedicated jetty aimed at catering for the growing interest in small-scale services, Gate is also preparing a feasibility study for another project in this growing market.

Gate shareholders, Gasunie and Vopak, approved a feasibility study looking into the transportation of LNG via rail tank cars and to make a connection with railways which are close by, Adriaens said.

‘This would be an interesting addition as there are no many projects around the world transporting LNG via rail tank cars as most of the LNG rail transport is handled via ISO containers,” he added.

By Mirza Duran