Germany's First LNG Terminal Project Seeks Planning Permission

Written by Martin Lynch, European News Editor for Industrial Info (Galway, Ireland)--The company behind Germany's first liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal has announced that it has applied for planning permission at its Brunsbüttel site.

The permit will seek to build a port for handling LNG and will cover, among other things, a jetty with two berthing facilities for ships up to Q-Max size, as well as facilities for distributing LNG by trucks, rail tank cars and smaller ships. The documents submitted will also serve as the basis for obtaining permission for the planned terminal, which will have two LNG tanks, each with 165,000 cubic meters (M3) capacity and an LNG regasification unit. This will give the terminal capacity to feed up to 8 billion normal cubic meters (Nm3) of natural gas into the grid each year. Developer of the projects, German LNG Terminal GmBH, is a joint venture owned by Dutch companies Gasunie LNG Holding BV and Vopak LNG Holding BV as well as Oiltanking GmbH, a subsidiary of Marquard & Bahls AG (Hamburg). The projects are worth almost US$600 million.

"After the EU Commission's approval of exemption a month ago, this is another important milestone for the overall project," said Rolf Brouwer, managing director of German LNG Terminal. "It is not only an important step towards realising the LNG terminal in Brunsbüttel, but also towards building infrastructure for supplying increasing volumes of climate-neutral energy sources and fuels." The EC approved a decision by Germany's regulatory authorities in 2020 exempting the planned terminal from tariff and network access regulations on a long-term basis.

In September 2018, German LNG Terminal secured a provisional contract with RWE AG (Essen, Germany) for "a considerable part" of the planned terminal's LNG import capacity. However, a final investment decision on that deal was pushed back from 2020 to sometime later this year.

Industrial Info is tracking two other key German LNG projects. Hanseatic Energy Hub Gmbh (HEH) is spearheading a larger 12 billion-cubic-meter-per-year (Bcm/yr) terminal at Stade. There is also a floating storage and regasification unit (FSRU) project by Uniper SE and Mitsui O.S.K. Lines, Ltd. It has a planned send-out capacity of 10 Bcm/yr and an LNG storage capacity of 263,000 cubic meters. However, Uniper applied the brakes to the project in November, citing market players' reluctance to make binding bookings for import capacities at the planned terminal in the current circumstances.

At the time, project manager Oliver Giese, Uniper, explained, "Economic uncertainties have definitely played a role in the current circumstances. Many companies don't want to make long-term commitments at the moment. The results of the expression-of-interest procedure show that we need to revise the scope and focus of the planned terminal to ensure that it remains attractive to market players and economically predictable for LTeW and Uniper."

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