Page 6 - GLNG Week 32 2021

GLNG AFRICA GLNG
Sonatrach says Skikda LNG plant has resumed production
PERFORMANCE
SONATRACH, the national oil company (NOC) of Algeria, confirmed last week that it had restarted production at the Skikda LNG plant.
In a statement, Sonatrach said that the gas liquefaction plant had resumed normal opera- tions on July 30 after a shutdown that lasted 45 days. It said it had used the time the facility was off line to wrap up the repair of a gas turbine and complete maintenance work originally sched- uled for 2022.
The shutdown did not have any adverse effects on Skikda LNG’s customers, it added. While the plant was idle, it explained, Sonatrach’s Arzew LNG facility sent some of the volumes produced by its own three trains to buyers waiting for fuel from Skikda LNG.
The Algerian NOC had said in a statement in June that the shutdown was necessary because of technical problems. “A technical issue occurred on June 11 at the Skikda LNG complex and led to the shutdown of this complex,” it said. It described the problem as “a sudden failure of
a gas turbine control mechanism” but did not elaborate.
The Skikda plant, located on Algeria’s north- ern coast, processes gas from the Hassi R’Mel fields and is capable of turning out 4mn tonnes per year (tpy) of LNG. It remained off line for more than half of 2020, powering down in Jan- uary for a scheduled two-month maintenance programme and then extending the closure until July following the discovery of damage to one of the plant’s 14 turbines in February.
Sonatrach opted last year to repair the tur- bine rather than replace it, as the replacement process would have kept the Skikda facility out of production for 18 months. It also sought to compensate for the loss of the plant’s capacity by increasing the volume of LNG exported from the Arzew plant. Even so, the extension of the maintenance programme caused Alge- ria’s LNG exports to drop to 10.9mn tonnes in 2020, equivalent to just 43% of the 25.3 tpy operational export capacity of the Skikda and Arzew plants.™
AMERICAS
Cosan subsidiary begins building LNG import terminal in Santos
PROJECTS & COMPANIES
COMPASS Gas e Energia, a unit of Brazil’s Cosan industrial group, recently began building a new LNG regasification terminal in the port of Santos in São Paulo state.
Cosan announced the start of construction work on the São Paulo Regasification Terminal (TRSP) in a press release earlier this month. The terminal will receive natural gas via a chartered floating storage and regasification unit (FSRU), it said. It did not reveal any details of the charter but said that the vessel would be able to handle the equivalent of 14mn cubic metres per day of gas and would have a storage capacity of 173,000 cubic metres.
According to the press release, Cosan expects Compass Gas e Energia to complete the facility in about 20 months. The cost of construction is slated to reach BRL700mn ($134.1mn), it said.
Cosan’s CEO Nelson Gomes said during a webcast in March of this year that a unit of TotalEnergies (France) would deliver LNG to
the terminal. He reported that Compass Gas e Energia’s marketing team was nearly ready to wrap up negotiations on the supply deal with Total Gas and Power, saying that the proposed contract would “comprise fixed and floating vol- umes with different indexing options in terms of prices.”
Gomes also described TRSP as “the first link Brazil will have with the international LNG market.”
Cosan expects the project to support the development of Brazil’s domestic gas market. It said in early August that TRSP would “serve as an important lever in developing the free natural gas market and will ultimately improve compe- tition through a better offer of natural gas in the Brazilian territory.”
The industrial group also stated that Compass Gas e Energia had drawn up plans for the new terminal within the framework of wider efforts to create “more competitive gas and power alter- natives [for] its clients.”™
P6
w w w . N E W S B A S E . c o m Week 32 13•August•2021