“We will get cheaper gas when we have an alternative to the current supplier – the company Gazprom. As we know, Gazprom applies an outdated pricing scheme, that it links with the price of crude, prices of petroleum products. The correlations between gas and crude are being broken in many countries, including Europe and elsewhere in the world. In particular, the US – we know that fuel prices are also growing there, same as in Lithuania, but the price of natural gas have stayed record low for three or four years already, four to five times cheaper than in Lithuania,” he said in an interview to Žinių Radijas on Tuesday.
“Of course, one of the reasons concerns the discovery of shale gas there [in the US], but here, in Lithuania, we have a room for an alternative, that is why a liquefied gas terminal is being built in Klaipėda,” Udrenas said.
The terminal would open up possibilities for Lithuania to develop the gas market that would not be linked with petroleum products, he said.
“There is no market and it shall be created. Same as antitrust laws 100 years ago in America – they broke monopolies by force through legislation. So it is obvious enough that operations of the terminal could be guaranteed by legislation – technologically, it cannot stand empty, and the carcass of the vessel is a complex system, which shall be maintained, and Gazprom would lift the prices immediately if it saw that the operations of the terminal were not optimal,” Udrėnas said.
It is planned that the LNG terminal, estimated to cost about 200 million euros, will have an annual capacity of 2 billion to 3 billion cubic meters. A bout a billion cubic meters of gas should be pumped via the terminal in the first year.
