Oscarline Onwuemenyi,
with agency reports
03 June 2016, Sweetcrude, Abuja – Portugal’s Sines LNG terminal has received its first liquefied natural gas cargo of the month from Nigeria.
According to the shipping data by the Port of Sines, the cargo was delivered aboard the 135,000 cb/m LNG Rivers.
The chilled gas was loaded at Nigeria’s LNG export plant on Bonny Island.
Sines LNG terminal, owned by REN Atlântico, lies on the Portuguese Atlantic coast. It has a nominal send out capacity of 600,000 cubic meters per hour.
The terminal was also the first European facility to receive a cargo of LNG produced from shale gas from Cheniere’s Sabine Pass LNG export facility in Louisiana.
Last week, Lisbon-based Galp Energia reportedly issued a tender aiming to sell liquefied natural gas cargoes from the Nigeria LNG facility on the Bonny Island.
Reports quoted trade sources as saying Galp Energia is looking to sell four to six cargoes annually for a period of five years.
Galp Energia has three 20-year deals with Nigeria LNG for the supply of 3.5 billion cubic meters of liquefied natural gas in total.
In recent years, Galp Energia regularly offloaded supply on the spot market. The latest tender is expected to be awarded by the end of the month.
Galp has been building up its international LNG business from the second half of the last decade when the Portuguese market started to open to competition, and most noticeably since the combined effects of the financial crisis and the Portugal’s IMF/ECB/EU assistance program in 2011 caused domestic consumption of natural gas to drop sharply.
The company recently received a spot cargo it bought from Houston-based LNG player Cheniere at the Sines terminal in Portugal. This was the first U.S. LNG cargo produced from shale gas to reach Europe.