A unit of Switzerland-based trading firm MET Group said it has delivered its first LNG cargo to Croatia’s Krk facility in the northern Adriatic Sea.
Shell’s 145,000-cbm vessel Methane Nile Eagle brought the cargo to LNG Croatia FSRU on Monday, according to MET Croatia Energy Trade.
The vessel previously took a cargo at the Fluxys-operated LNG import terminal in Belgium, MET Croatia said, adding that it plans to deliver two more shipments to the FSRU by October this year.
MET, Hungary’s MFGK but also Qatar’s PowerGlobe have booked all of the volumes at the Krk facility for the next three years.
Croatia’s first LNG terminal has the capacity to send up to 2.6 bcm per year of natural gas into the national grid.
In total, MET booked an overall capacity of 2.67 bcm at the Krk LNG terminal for a period of seven years.
Moreover, this marks the first delivery to the facility for MET but the firm also supplied the commissioning cargo to the FSRU in Spain’s Sagunto in November 2020.
Five cargoes in total
Croatian FSRU has now received in total five cargoes, including three from US and one from Nigeria. The facility waited almost two months between the first and the second cargo as cargoes diverted from Europe to higher-paying markets in Asia following an unbelievable surge in spot prices in January.
“Since the terminal started in January 2021, it has been a rather turbulent beginning of operations, with pricing anomalies and arbitrary situations on the global scale and changes to the delivery schedule locally at the terminal. However, since March the arrival of vessels to the terminal has stabilized,” Mario Matković, CEO of MET Croatia, said in the statement.
The newest shipment marks the first delivery from an EU port, MET said. But the Zeebrugge terminal is an import facility and the cargo that arrived in Croatia originates from another liquefaction facility, if not from several of them.
Zeebrugge imports LNG mainly from Qatar but Russia as well. Fluxys regularly conducts transshipments at the facility with LNG coming from the Novatek-operated Yamal project in the Russian Arctic.
