UAE gas company ADNOC Gas announced Monday a deal worth at least $1 billion with France’s TotalEnergies to supply it with liquefied natural gas as European countries seek to diversify their suppliers away from Russia.
This agreement, valid for three years, is worth between 1 and 1.2 billion dollars (between 900 million and 1 billion euros), said in a statement ADNOC Gas, a subsidiary of the UAE oil giant Abu Dhabi National Oil Company(ADNOC). The agreement was signed with TotalEnergies Gas and its subsidiary Power Limited.
In July 2022, an agreement between the French multinational and ADNOC was signed “to cooperate in the energy supply sector”, during a visit to Paris by the President of the United Arab Emirates, Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyane. The Emirati liquefied natural gas (LNG) “will be delivered to various export markets around the world,” added the Emirati company, which did not specify the volumes supplied. “The agreement should start in 2023 and is aimed primarily at the Asian market,” TotalEnergies Group told AFP.
The Emirates also announced in September that it would supply Germany with natural gas and diesel, as part of an agreement on “energy security”. European countries are relying more and more on LNG as an alternative to Russian gas, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
This is a particularly sensitive issue for Germany, which imports half of its gas from Russia. France, for its part, was importing before the war in Ukraine -launched in February 2022 by the Russian invasion– nearly 17% of natural gas from Russia, according to the Ministry of Ecological Transition.
In 2021, the United Arab Emirates produced 57 billion cubic meters of natural gas, or about 1.4% of global production, according to figures from BP Statistical Review of World Energy. In the same year, according to the same source, the Emirates produced 8.8 billion cubic meters of liquefied natural gas, or 1.7% of global exports. The country hopes to reach an annual production of 15 million tons in the next few years, according to Bloomberg.
