Excelerate’s FSRU leaves Spanish yard to start Wilhelmshaven job

In 2023, Excelerate’s FSRU Excelsior arrived at the Navantia yard in El Ferrol, Spain, for a planned stopover before its job in Wilhelmshaven.

However, the launch of DET’s second Wilhelmshaven LNG terminal had been postponed several times, and the FSRU finally left the yard on Monday.

The unit is expected to arrive in the Dutch port of Rotterdam later this week.

“The FSRU is on its way from Ferrol to Rotterdam to be prepared for its deployment in Wilhelmshaven,” a spokesman for DET told LNG Prime.

“We are still expecting the Excelsior to arrive in Wilhelmshaven in the course of April,” he said.

The spokesman did not provide further details regarding the commsioining of the unit in Wilhrlmshaven.

In February, DET said that it expected the unit to arrive in Wilhelmshaven by the end of the first quarter but then changed the arrival timeline to April.

DET’s second terminal in Wilhelmshaven will have a capacity of about 4 bcm per year and features a new jetty, which was completed last year.

The company currently operates the Brunsbüttel and Wilhelmshaven 1 FSRU-based terminals.

Besides Wilhelmshaven 2, DET is also working on the Stade FSRU-based terminal.

However, the company recently terminated the contract related to the Stade FSRU-based facility with compatriot Hanseatic Energy Hub, the developer of the onshore LNG terminal in Stade.

In March 2024, the 2021-built 174,000-cbm FSRU, Energos Force, owned by Apollo’s Energos Infrastructure and chartered by Germany’s federal government, arrived at the AVG jetty in Stade.

However, DET’s third FSRU-based facility has not been commissioned since then.