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Asked about the completion of the transaction during Shell’s fourth-quarter earnings call on Thursday, Gorman said that the company is “waiting for regulatory approvals, hoping and expecting them by the end of Q1, but we’ll see what occurs.”
“And of course… I expect it to really start having an impact in 2026. But we will see it come this year,” she said.
In June last year, Singapore’s investment firm Temasek agreed to sell 100 percent of its shares in Pavilion Energy to a unit of Shell.
State-owned Temasek said at the time that the deal with Shell Eastern Trading is expected to be completed by the first quarter of 2025, subject to regulatory approvals.
Established in 2013 by Temasek, Pavilion is a Singapore-based LNG player that has operations in Singapore and Europe and it markets and trades LNG in Europe and Asia to a wide range of customers and counterparties.
It has built a diverse portfolio of about 6.5 mtpa of LNG supply contracts from suppliers like Chevron, BP, and QatarEnergy.
The contracts also include Iberdrola’s LNG asset portfolio from Pavilion’s 2019 acquisition.
In addition, Pavilion has offtake contracts from US liquefaction facilities at Corpus Christi, Freeport LNG, and Cameron LNG.
Shell’s view on LNG market
During the quarterly call, Shell CEO Wael Sawan also answered a question on Shell’s view of the LNG market.
He said 2024 was “very light on new supplies, so roughly 1 percent addition compared to the 400 million tonnes sort of global market.”
“We anticipate 2025 will be of a similar magnitude,” he said.
“So that’s two relatively slow years at a time when latent demand continues to grow,” Sawan said.
“Now, you have two sort of different stories at the moment is what we see,” he said
“In Europe, of course, the low storage that we see at the moment, that’s just around 55 percent or so, which is low compared to the five-year average and could end up around 30 percent or even lower– and of course the Russian situation – does mean that there’s quite a bit of demand still in Europe,” Sawan said.
He said Asia is “a bit softer, partly because of price sensitivity, partly because of a warmer winter, and partly because storage is healthy there.”
“So you are going to see inter-basin plays. As we look beyond that, the big question is what is the latent demand going to be? Because we know that at around $10 per MMBtu, you have a lot of demand coming through,” he said.
“We’ve seen it for example, in shipping, significant growth in shipping demand for LNG. We’ve seen it in LNG trucking in China and in India,” he said.
“And of course, we will see it play out in industry as many industries sort of go back to gas where they have the opportunity to do so,” he said.
“And so I don’t have the luxury of just looking at the LNG market over the next two to three years. We need to be looking at it 10, 20, 30 years,” he said.
“It is a very robust market, 50 plus percent growth between now and 2040, and really the opportunity for us to be able to take the incoming LNG Canada volumes, the Qatari volumes, many of our LNG market-creating opportunities, and to really continue to cement ourselves through that, while recognizing that it will take time as Pavilion comes through for us, as LNG Canada comes through for us,” he said.
“We’ve always said 2025 was a year of balance in our supply portfolio. We don’t have as much length as ideally we would like. But of course, we start to come into that length as we get towards the end of the year,” Sawan said.