Höegh LNG’s FSRU Independence performed the 50th ship-to-ship transfer since it started operating as Lithuania’s liquefied natural gas import terminal. 

Lithuania’s Klaipedos Nafta said the operation was carried out on Friday, May 25th, when the LNG carrier Arctic Voyager delivered 140,000 cubic meters of the chilled fuel to the terminal.

Since October 2014, when the FSRU Independence began operations in Klaipėda, the terminal has received 42 LNG imports, i.e. 5.4 million cubic meters of LNG.

The average size of one load was 139,000 cubic meters of LNG, while the largest shipment was delivered to Klaipėda terminal by the Valencia Knutsen, which has a capacity of 173,000 cubic meters.

Gas has been supplied to Lithuania from four countries: Norway, the United States, Trinidad and Tobago, and Nigeria.

Tadas Matulionis, LNG business director at KN, estimates that since 2016, utilization of Klaipėda terminal has been one of the highest among all of the LNG terminals in Europe, supplying about half of all of the natural gas consumed in Lithuania.

“The demand for LNG terminal services remains high, with the terminal operating at over 90percentt capacity during some months. Over three billion cubic metres of natural gas have already been provided for consumers in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia,” he said.

The utilization of the terminal was also increased by the reloading of LNG to small-scale LNG vessels. The first reloading operation was performed at the beginning of 2017, when the first small-scale LNG vessel, the Coral Energy, was received and loaded at the terminal.

After successfully reloading LNG from the FSRU, LNG export activities gained momentum, and since early 2017, the terminal has already performed eight LNG reloads for re-export to small-scale LNG import terminals in Sweden, Finland and Norway. Lithuania has become the 12th country in the world that LNG is re-exported from.