The European Commission announced on Thursday that it would be taking the UK and the Republic of Ireland to the European Court of Justice over limitations in the availability of gas interconnection capacity between the two countries, which are preventing competition, the Commission said.
UK independent IGas Energy announced on Thursday that it has encountered a shale gas deposit while drilling at the Ince Marshes site in Cheshire, northwest England. The UK company said that previous analysis suggested there may be 4.6 Tcf of gas initially in place (GIIP) in the area.
Woodside Petroleum is considering the sale of a small stake in the three-train 12 mtpa Browse LNG project in Western Australia, after it was approached by “a number of parties” interested in buying a stake in the project, the company said on Friday.
BG Group said on Thursday that it has agreed to purchase an additional 2 mtpa of LNG from Cheniere Energy’s proposed Sabine Pass export plant in Louisiana in the US. The additional 2 mtpa of LNG adds to the sales and purchase agreement signed between the pair in October last year for 3.5 mtpa of LNG over a 20-year period.
Raising finance for major energy infrastructure projects from banks is becoming increasingly difficult, said Walter Peeraer, chief executive of Belgium’s natural gas transmission system operator Fluxys. Speaking at the European Gas Conference in Vienna on Tuesday, Peeraer said banks are “more and more reluctant to finance industrial risk”, leading project backers to look for alternative finance sources.
Continued weakness in the US natural gas market meant Trinidad and Tobago exported only 19% of its LNG exports to the US in 2011, sending the remaining 81% to better priced markets in South America, Europe and Asia. The US has been the main destination of choice for Trinidad and Tobago’s LNG since the start of LNG production in 1999, with 89% of the country’s exports shipped to the US in 2005.
ExxonMobil has continued work on its $15.7 billion Papua New Guinea LNG project (PNG LNG) after a landslide in two nearby villages killed at least four people on Tuesday and temporarily halted operations, according to media reports on Wednesday. ExxonMobil said the stoppage is not expected to impact the overall schedule of the PNG LNG project, which is located around 7 kilometres away from the landslide area.
The proposed Trans-Anatolian pipeline (TANAP), conceived by Turkey’s BOTAS and Azerbaijan’s SOCAR to transport Caspian region gas across Turkey to Europe, is rapidly gaining credence as a key part of the Southern Corridor gas export route. But support for the EU-backed Nabucco pipeline, which TANAP would make partly redundant, is falling away. Nabucco shareholder RWE earlier this month acknowledged that the TANAP proposal “has created a new situation”, and Nabucco’s Shah Deniz ambitions have also been dented by the emergence of the South East Europe Pipeline (SEEP).
LNG Business Review - Full February 2012 Digital Issue
Ichthys FID puts Australia on track to become largest LNG exporter by 2018
LNG in 2012 – Robust demand as supply growth slows
The Strait of Hormuz: Could Iran hold the world to ransom?
Not so simple: the UK’s developing role as a global LNG swing market
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Gas demand on a temperature corrected basis in Europe is estimated to fall by around 10% this year, a drop unprecedented in the history of the industry, and recovery is likely to be slow, according to Jonathan Stern, director of Gas Research at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies.
Italy-based ERG has said that planned start-up of its PrioloLNG project which it is jointly developing with Shell has been delayed by a year and is now expected to come onstream in 2014
Qatargas and RasGas could between them increase LNG capacity by 12 mtpa beyond the 77 mtpa already under development through debottlenecking the six mega-trains currently coming on stream.
The global recession is likely to cut energy-related carbon dioxide emissions by as much as 3% this year, giving governments some breathing space to push through a post-Kyoto framework, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said Tuesday, although it warns that urgent action is still needed to address greenhouse gas emissions.