TotalEnergies’ subsidiary LNG Services France will launch a campaign in January to reserve regasification capacity on its future floating LNG carrier in Le Havre, the French energy giant said in a statement.
This campaign is intended to “offer the market the possibility of reserving up to 2.5 billion cubic meters per year of regasification capacity” at the Le Havre floating LNG terminal, “for a period of five years from September 2023″, when it is expected to be commissioned, the company says. “The war in Ukraine has highlighted the need for the European Union and France to diversify their gas supply sources,” TotalEnergies adds.
The campaign, which will be conducted in two stages, will begin with a no-obligation call for expressions of interest in which interested parties can indicate “the volume they wish to acquire” from January 16 to 27. It will be followed by a call for tenders in March.
At the end of July, the public authorities selected TotalEnergies’ floating LNG terminal project as a new import point for liquefied natural gas (LNG) at Le Havre.
France is currently supplied by four LNG import terminals (two in Fos-sur-Mer, one in Montoir de Bretagne and one in Dunkirk) and wanted to secure this supply with a new terminal.
Moored in the port of Le Havre, the TotalEnergies vessel named “Cape Ann” will be able to inject about 10% of France’s annual consumption from LNG carriers that will supply it with gas possibly from Norway, Algeria, Qatar, the United States, Nigeria, Angola or Egypt.
The doubling of LNG import capacity planned in Europe to meet gas supply problems since the start of the war in Ukraine “threatens to derail the EU’s climate goals,” however, estimated the U.S. NGO Global Energy Monitor in a report published last week.
The European Commission aims to reduce net greenhouse gas emissions by at least 55% by 2030 by reducing dependence on fossil fuels such as gas.
