Gazprom is preparing to ship the first cargo of liquefied natural gas from its Portovaya LNG production, storage, and shipment complex in the Leningrad region, according to shipping data.
Sovcomflot’s 170,000-cbm LNG carrier Pskov was on Monday morning located at the 138,107-cbm Portovyy, which serves as a floating storage unit for Gazprom’s LNG export project located near Russia’s Baltic Sea port of Vysotsk.
Pskov’s AIS data provided by VesselsValue shows that the 2014-built vessel had docked at the FSU during the weekend.
LNG Prime contacted the operator of the plant, Gazprom LNG Portovaya, for a comment regarding the first shipment and the start of production, but we did not receive a reply by the time this article was published.
Gazprom’s Deputy Chief Executive Vitaly Markelov said last week during a conference that the plant had already produced about 30,000 tons of LNG, according to several local media reports.
Gazprom plans to supply LNG produced at the plant to the 174,000-cbm Marshal Vasilevskiy located off Russia’s Kaliningrad and the international markets, the reports said.
In November last year, Gazprom said that the construction of the delayed project was in its final stage. The project’s FSU Portovyy, previously known as LNG carrier Excel, also arrived in November.
Once fully commissioned, the Portovaya LNG plant would produce about 1.5 million tons of LNG per year from two trains.
The plant will liquefy natural gas coming from the nearby Portovaya compressor station, part of Gazprom’s currently closed Nord Stream pipeline.
Russia’s Peton Group is the main EPC contractor while Linde provided the liquefaction tech and built the project’s 42,000-cbm LNG tank along with Renaissance Heavy Industries.