German energy traders have developed an interest in Canadian liquefied natural gas to boost supply via swap deals, Canada’s natural resources minister said this week.
According to Tim Hodgson, as quoted by CBC, many German companies were interested in trading Canadian LNG on the global market. “They can take advantage of our production on the West Coast to supply German needs in the Atlantic,” by selling the Canadian cargoes on the spot market and buying cheaper LNG to deliver to Germany.
The previous government led by Justin Trudeau had said there was no business case for liquefied natural gas in Canada during a visit of then-Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who had gone to Canada looking for alternatives to Russian pipeline gas.
“The previous government made its decision based on the situation at the time. What we’ve been elected to do is respond to the realities today, taking into account what Canadians expect of us,” the current natural resources minister said.
Canada only has one operational LNG plant, the LNG Canada facility in Kitimat, British Columbia, which produced its first batch for sale in June. For now, production capacity from the first train of LNG Canada is 5.6 million tons per year, but this should go up to 14 million tons when all planned trains are completed.
Backed by Shell, Petronas, PetroChina, Mitsubishi, and Kogas, LNG Canada will help redirect a portion of Canadian gas exports—currently flowing almost entirely to the U.S.—toward global markets. The price tag of the project is $40 billion. The most logical target market for LNG Canada’s product is Asia because of geography, but with a pretty well-developed global spot market for liquefied gas, bargains could probably be made with German energy buyers as well. No spot-market LNG bargain would be as good as pipeline gas in terms of price, but it may help bring down the exorbitant cost of energy in Europe’s biggest—and struggling—economy.
By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com
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