“The terminal will ensure safe and reliable supply of natural gas to the country, and create possibilities for the competition in the natural gas market. Upon the implementation of the project in 2014, Lithuania will no longer be dependent on the sole external supplier of natural gas. Moreover, competition stimulated by the compulsory requirement of 25 percent of the obtained amount of liquified natural gas, applied to natural gas enterprises, will bring down the prices of natural gas, while the price regulation established by law will prevent from the unreasonably high prices,“ the government said in a press release.
The discussions on the bill, which lasted for more than a fortnight, mostly centered on a possibility to sell up to 20 percent of shares in the terminal to foreign investors in future.
However, President Dalia Grybauskaitė urged to abandon this idea. Later the Energy Ministry submitted to the government an updated LNG terminal bill that no longer provided for selling up to one-fifth of shares in the terminal's operator to equipment or gas suppliers.
Klaipėdos Nafta (Klaipėda Oil), the state-run company that is implementing the project, plans to launch a tender this year for the supply of gas to the LNG terminal, expecting to sign a gas supply contract in the second half of the year.
The terminal is planned to be launched in late 2014, with about a billion cubic meters of gas expected to be pumped via the facility in the first year of operation. It is planned that the LNG terminal will have an annual capacity of 2 billion to 3 billion cubic meters.
2012-05-09 18:19
Lithuanian government approves bill on LNG terminal
The Lithuanian government approved a bill on a liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal designed to set forth all the terms and conditions required for the terminal in Klaipėda to launch operations by December 2014.
Grybauskaitė knows where the LNG terminal should be built. / Aurelijos Kripaitės/15min.lt nuotr.
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