Gazprom said it will pay about 126.7 billion rubles ($2 billion) to Peton to design, build and commission the plant near the Baltic Sea port of Vyborg by the end of 2018. Gazprom said that the plant will be located near the Portovaya compression station, the starting point for the company-led Nord Stream subsea gas export pipeline to Germany across the Baltic Sea.
According to the plan, the plant will help Gazprom deliver gas to the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, for which the company has already ordered a floating storage and regasification vessel from Korea’s Hyundai Heavy Industries.The FSRU, with storage capacity of 170,000 cubic metres and regasification capability of 13.2 million cubic metres per day, is to be delivered to Gazprom’s subsidiary, Gazpromflot, before 15 November 2017.
The plant could also help the company balance its gas supplies to Europe by turning the excess of pipeline gas, available in Vyborg, into LNG so that it can be taken to other markets. Although Nord Stream is capable of transporting up to 55 billion cubic metres of gas to Europe across the Baltic Sea from Vyborg, it has not run at full capacity since its commissioning in 2012.
The LNG plant is understood to be planned to have one processing train with annual capacity of up to 1.5 million tonnes of LNG.
