Finland’s Gasgrid has received approval to start offering reloading services at the country’s first FSRU-based facility in the port of Inkoo to boost the terminal’s utilization rate.
Gasgrid announced this move in March saying that the Finnish Energy Authority, or Energiavirasto, will carry out a consultation from March 16-30 to amend the terms and conditions submitted by Gasgrid’s unit and the operator of the terminal, Floating LNG Terminal Finland.
Energiavirasto has now confirmed the rules, according to a statement by Gasgrid issued on Tuesday.
“The approval of the terminal rules is second step to improve service provision of the terminal to the LNG markets in Baltics, Finland, and Sweden,” Satu Mattila, CEO of FLTF, said in the statement.
She said that the new reloading service will allow terminal users to choose according to their preference how to offtake LNG from the terminal, either as regasified LNG into the transmission network or in parcels as reloaded LNG into small-scale vessels.
“Reloading service will improve the security of supply to the areas where there is no pipeline coverage and will bring energy to the off-grid consumers”, Mattila said.
35 slots
Excelerate Energy’s 150,900-cbm FSRU Exemplar has a regasification capacity of more than 5 billion cubic meters per year and started supplying regasified LNG to the grid on December 29 as part of the commissioning phase.
After that, Gasgrid said in January that that the FSRU-based facility, which connects to a 2.2 km long gas transmission pipeline, was ready to start commercial operations.
Last month, the state-owned firm reduced the number of planned LNG import slots for the April-September period due to “limitation of transmission capacity in Balticconnector and expected market demand.”
Eesti Gas, a unit of Estonian investment firm Infortar, is the first customer and will bring in total seven shipments via Finland’s LNG facility in the port of Inkoo this year.
The firm recently received the first LNG shipment from the US.
According to a separate statement by Gasgrid, FLTF is offering in total 35 terminal slots of 1,000 GWh each for the period from October 1, 2023 to September 30, 2024.
“We expect the terminal to be unavailable for regasification due to maintenance for 24 hours during week 49, 12, 25 and for 48 hours during week 38,” it said.
The allocation procedure started on April 17 and interested parties must submit their terminal capacity requests by May 15, 2023.