Shell to withdraw from Gazprom’s Baltic LNG project
The British-Dutch company Shell plans to withdraw from the Baltic liquefied natural gas (LNG) project following Gazprom’s decision to integrate it with a gas processing plant in Ust-Luga, announced Shell Russia Chairman Cederic Cremers in a statement.
“Following Gazprom’s announcement on 29 March regarding the final development concept of Baltic LNG, we have decided to stop our involvement in this project. We have a number of other ongoing projects with Gazprom, including as part of the Strategic Alliance established between the two companies in 2015, which are not impacted by this decision,” Cremers noted.
In 2015 Shell became Gazprom’s sole partner in Baltic LNG. The technical development of the project began in 2018. Initially, Shell assessed the plant’s capacity at 10 million tons of LNG per year, with a possible later expansion to 13 million tons.
This March, Gazprom changed the project concept to include the full integration of Baltic LNG and a gas processing plant. Gazprom mentioned only one partner in the new version of the project: RusGazDobycha, which is partially owned by the National Gas Group. The jointly owned company RusKhimAlyans will be the project’s operator. No involvement on the part of Shell was mentioned.
Baltic LNG will be a liquefied natural gas plant in the region of the Ust-Luga port in Russia’s Leningrad region. The target markets for the LNG it produces will be countries in the Atlantic region, Middle East, Southern Asia, and low-tonnage LNG markets in the Baltic and North Sea regions.