A plant with an annual capacity of 13.3 billion cubic meters of natural gas is planned for the port.
(Photo: dpa)
Berlin Stade is catching up fast as a possible location for a terminal for processing liquefied natural gas (LNG). With only three dissenting votes, the Hanseatic City Council gave the municipal approval for the planned LNG terminal in Stade ahead of schedule on Monday evening.
“And before Easter we will submit the approval documents for the terminal and port,” said Johann Killinger, managing partner of the Hanseatic Energy Hub (HEH), the Handelsblatt. HEH is driving the project forward.
In addition to the Hamburg port and shipping logistics company Buss Group, of which Killinger is also a managing partner, the Belgian pipeline and liquid gas terminal operator Fluxys and the Swiss private equity experts Partners Group are on board. Other industrial companies are considering entry.
The plan is to build a regasification and storage facility with an annual capacity of 13.3 billion cubic meters of natural gas. To put this in perspective: 60 billion cubic meters of natural gas flowed through the Nord Stream 1 Baltic Sea pipeline last year.
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The federal government is committed to the construction of LNG terminals in order to reduce dependence on Russian natural gas as quickly as possible. Several locations are under discussion. The plans in Brunsbüttel are very concrete: At the beginning of March, the Federal Ministry of Economics announced that the federal government would take a 50 percent stake in the planned LNG terminal in Brunsbüttel via the state development bank KfW. The partner will be the Dutch gas network operator Gasunie, which is wholly owned by the Dutch state. RWE will take over a smaller share.
In addition to Stade, Brunsbüttel and Wilhelmshaven are among the possible locations
Wilhelmshaven is also one of the candidates that the federal government has in mind. But Stade is also in the running: “We are in close contact with politicians, but are still privately financed,” HEH recently emphasized. Federal Minister of Economics Robert Habeck also names Stade as a possible location.
Stade advertises with its close connection to the industrial infrastructure in the immediate vicinity. The liquefied natural gas is to be landed and heated on the premises of the chemical company Dow in Stade. For transport, the gas is cooled to minus 162 degrees and thus liquefied.
Qatar wants to supply liquefied gas to Germany, but only with long-term contracts.
(Photo: dpa)
When it is heated, it becomes gaseous again and can be fed into the long-distance gas pipeline network just ten kilometers from the site. This would make it available in Germany and beyond the borders. The waste heat from production at Dow could even be used for heating, so that no CO2 would be produced during operation.
>>Read here: How liquid gas terminals want to go green
From Killinger’s point of view, environmental reasons and economic advantages speak in favor of his project, which costs around one billion euros: Otherwise, 1.5 percent of the landed LNG would have to be used to heat the liquefied gas. And according to Killinger, the proximity to a pipeline also speaks for Stade. “The location is made for a terminal. Everything is there: Industry, infrastructure and more than 50 years of experience in handling liquefied gases.” Killinger says the LNG terminal could “be ready by 2026”.
In addition, Killinger argues, in addition to conventional LNG, “bio-LNG and synthetic methane can be processed right from the start”. Killinger can point to interested parties who could immediately use the infrastructure to import green gas.
“The LNG terminal project in Stade fits in perfectly with our plans. We could start supplying significant quantities of advanced bio-LNG and synthetic LNG in two to three years,” Claus Sauter, head of biofuel supplier Verbio AG, said recently.
>>Read here: Germany picks up speed as it turns away from Russian energy
But in addition to Stade, Wilhelmshaven and Brunsbüttel, other locations are also being considered. In a conversation with Minister Habeck, the Ukrainian Deputy Energy Minister Yaroslav Demchenkov had discussed the construction of an LNG terminal on the Baltic Sea: “It would be necessary at the landing point of the Nord Stream 1 pipeline to replace Russian natural gas there with gas from other countries in the future to replace,” said Demtschenkow the Handelsblatt. From Lubmin near Greifswald, the Eugal and Opal pipelines are already transporting the natural gas that has landed southwards.
The city is under discussion as a location for a new LNG terminal.
(Photo: dpa)
Killinger’s Buss Group was also involved in the construction of the two strands of Nord Stream: together with the city of Sassnitz, it operates the terminal in the port of Mukran on the island of Rügen. The pipes for the Russian Baltic Sea pipelines were laid from Germany’s largest island. “Ever since then, I’ve been interested in the topic of natural gas,” reported Killinger on the sidelines of the Doha Forum. In the capital of Qatar, the Hamburg entrepreneur had already spoken about possible LNG deliveries to northern Germany.
Qatar itself, however, does not want to invest in a German LNG terminal at the moment, stressed Minister of State for Energy Saad Al-Kaabi in Doha. But his country also has an interest in diversification. Consumers like Germany were looking for more supplier countries in order to get out of dependencies on Russia, for example.
Qatar has so far delivered 85 percent of its liquefied gas to Asia. Qatar is striving for long-term supply contracts and would also like to deliver to Germany under these conditions. Before the Russian crisis, the EU relied primarily on short-term procurement on the markets and wanted to push back long-term agreements.
“Liquid gas is my focus because I realized that Germany is not really integrated into the global gas markets due to its close ties to Russian pipeline gas,” reports Killinger. Now he is in the middle of a major geopolitical conflict with his project and has to get support from the state government of Lower Saxony and the federal government for his location on the south bank of the Elbe.
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