Page 6 - Euroil Week 02 2020
P. 6
EurOil PIPELINES & TRANSPORT EurOil
Nord Stream 2 launch pushed back to early 2021
RUSSIA
Following sanctions, Russia’s hopes rest on a pipelaying vessel it bought from China in 2016.
RUSSIAN President Vladimir Putin has said the Nord Stream 2 pipeline may not start working until the first quarter of 2021 – over a year later than its original launch date.
“Completion of the construction [of Nord Stream 2] will be delayed by several months,” Putin said at a Moscow press conference, posted on the Kremlin’s website. “But I hope that by the end of this year, or in the first quarter of next year, work will be completed and the pipeline will begin to work.”
Nord Stream 2 initially faced delays because of Denmark’s slowness in issuing necessary per- mits for its construction through Danish waters. Then in December, Washington passed sanc- tions prohibiting international companies from helping Russia lay the pipe.
Swiss-based Allseas prompted suspended work on the pipe and recalled its pipelaying ves- sel, causing construction to grind to a halt.
Only 160 km of the 2,460-km two-string pipe- line is left to build. Russia has said it can finish the remainder on its own without foreign assistance, Gazprom CEO Alexei Miller told the press on
January 12, as cited by Kommersant daily. Moscow has its own pipelaying vessel, Gaz- prom’s Academic Chersky, for the task, the news-
paper reported last month.
Russia has always outsourced construction
of major subsea pipelines such as Blue Stream, Nord Stream 1 and more recently TurkStream, to foreign contractors. But in 2016, it acquired a pipelaying vessel built by Jiangsu Hantong Ship Heavy Industry in China, apparently for the specific purpose of completing Nord Stream 2 if sanctions were imposed. NewsBase understands that the vessel has not been used since being acquired by Gazprom.
Nord Stream 2 will pump up to 55bn cubic metres of Russian gas to Germany and other European countries once operational. Sanc- tions are not the only obstacle the project faces. In September the EU Court of Justice also imposed a 50% cap on Gazprom’s use of the 36bn cubic metre per year OPAL pipe- line in Germany, limiting future gas flows via Nord Stream 2 pipeline. German regulators are appealing the decision.
Norway piped gas exports fell 6.3% in 2019
NORWAY
Europe is high on LNG supply.
NORWAY’S piped gas exports fell in 2019, as operators undertook extensive maintenance at fields and state-owned Equinor opted to hold back some supply in response to low gas prices in Europe.
According to national pipeline operator Gassco, shipments from Norway to the rest of Europe came to under 107bn cubic metres last year, down 6.3% versus 2018, when 114.2 bcm was shipped.
European gas prices were weighed down in 2019 by record LNG imports of almost 76mn tonnes, as a result of increased global supply and even lower prices in Asia. Norway, Russia and other piped gas suppliers ceded market share to this competition.
Instead of selling gas cheaply now, Equinor has been keeping volumes back to export after prices recover. In November, it secured approval from the authorities to cut its gas production quota at the large Troll field to 36 bcm for the year ending October 2020, down from 34 bcm in the previous 12 months.
Output has also been impeded by a record volume of unscheduled repairs this year – partly the result of Equinor and other producers delay- ing maintenance work during the oil market downturn to cut costs. Production plummeted to a 15-year low in September of 192.7mn cubic metres per day, while repairs were underway at Troll and the Kollsnes processing plant, among other sites. It has since picked up, reaching 333.2 mcm per day in November, up 10% month on month but still down 2.1% year on year and 3.1% under forecast.
“Even in a year with a big rise in European imports of liquefied natural gas, Norway’s gas deliveries were well above the average for the past decade,” Gassco CEO Frode Leversun said in a statement on January 10.
NGL and condensate deliveries from pro- cessing plants in Karsto, Kollnes and Nyhamna totalled 10.1mn tonnes in 2019, according to Gassco. Norway also exports additional gas not included in the operator’s figures in the form of LNG.
P6
w w w. N E W S B A S E . c o m Week 02 16•January•2020
