Until now Germany was the only major EU country that did not have the infrastructure to receive liquefied natural gas (LNG) on its territory. On December 17, 2022, the first German LNG terminal was officially commissioned in the port of Wilhelmshaven on the North Sea.
It will deliver the first batch of fuel for German households and businesses on December 22 – on the eve of Western Christmas and ten months after Russia’s attack on Ukraine. Without this war, most likely, there would not be this terminal. At least not so quickly. Because of the unprecedented speed of its construction, driven by the need to urgently overcome gas dependence on Russia, the economic weekly Wirtschaftswoche talks about the “miracle of Wilhelmshaven”.
“Independent of pipelines from Russia”
“Today, Germany and the EU have significantly increased their security and independence,” said German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who arrived in Wilhelmshaven on Saturday, “This is a good day for our country, but it is also a good signal to the whole world that the German economy will continue to be strong, that it will continue to produce and will cope with the current challenge. The task of this and the following terminals is to make Germany’s energy supply “independent of pipelines from Russia,” he added.
165,000 cubic meters of liquefied gas-50,000 to 80,000 households can be supplied
FSRUs are essentially LNG regasification plant ships with their own storage tanks at minus 161-164 degrees Celsius. The approximately 300-meter-long Höegh Esperanza, which docked in Wilhelmshaven on December 15, was leased for ten years from Norwegian shipping company Leif Höegh and came from Spain, where it took on board 165,000 cubic meters of liquefied gas. It is this imported cargo after regasification that will start arriving next week to the gas transportation network of the Federal Republic of Germany.
Statistically, 50,000 to 80,000 households can be supplied with this volume during the year, Uniper, the operator of the LNG terminal in Wilhelmshaven, said. The capacity of this FSRU is 5 billion cubic meters per year, which exceeds 6% of Germany’s gas needs, which are currently shrinking due to increased savings and reorientation to other energy sources. And it is approximately 10% of the volumes that Gazprom exported to Germany through the Nord Stream gas pipeline with a capacity of 55 billion cubic meters per year before the war in Ukraine.
By the end of 2023, four more terminals are planned to be built in Brunsbüttel (Schleswig-Holstein), Stade (Lower Saxony) and Lubmin (Mecklenburg-Vorpommern). According to the calculations of the Ministry of Economy of Germany, together they can cover a third of the volume of natural gas needed by the country.