The 300th delivery of LNG has arrived at the Swinoujscie gas terminal

The 300th shipment of liquefied natural gas has arrived in Swinoujscie. The cargo arrived in the tanks of the gas carrier Prism Courage from the United States. Offshore LNG supply is one of the pillars of Poland’s gas security. Since the opening of the terminal in Świnoujście, the company has taken delivery of almost 24 million tonnes of the raw material via this route.

In 2024, this is already the 32nd ship received at the Polish gas port. The cargo received by ORLEN Group is 70,000 tonnes of LNG, which arrived from the United States, from the Corpus Christi terminal in the Gulf of Mexico.

Natural gas is a raw material of strategic importance for Poland’s fuel and energy security. LNG already accounts for nearly 50 per cent of the country’s total blue fuel imports. We are diversifying the directions of its supply by sea by consistently strengthening cooperation with partners from all over the world and building our own fleet of gas carriers, which will be expanded next year. This will guarantee our independence and stability of supplies and strengthen our position on the global LNG market,’ says Ireneusz Fąfara, CEO of ORLEN.

The total volume of all 300 deliveries amounts to approximately 358.9 TWh, which is equivalent to 23.6 million tonnes of LNG (over 31.2 billion cubic metres of natural gas in a volatile state). This amount of fuel would be sufficient to provide gas to all households in Poland using this fuel for over six years.

The receipt of LNG at Świnoujście has been one of the pillars of the strategy for diversification of gas imports to Poland from the outset. The share of supplies by sea in terms of the total supply of this raw material is systematically increasing. In 2016, LNG accounted for only around 8 per cent of gas supplies from abroad. By 2023, this share had risen to almost 46 per cent of Poland’s total blue fuel imports.

The largest number of LNG deliveries has reached Świnoujście from Qatar, from where 143 cargoes have so far arrived. The United States, which has been the main destination for LNG imports since 2022, accounted for 134 deliveries. This was followed by Norway with 14 cargoes, Nigeria with 3 deliveries, Trinidad and Tobago also with 3 deliveries, Egypt with 2 cargoes, and Equatorial Guinea with 1 cargo.

In strengthening the role of LNG in the country’s energy security system, the development of the company’s own fleet of gas carriers is important. ORLEN Group will have eight such units, four of which are already in use. The delivery of the remaining gas carriers is planned before the end of 2025.

The increasing dynamics of LNG imports to Poland is shown by the increasingly short time between consecutive deliveries. The hundredth LNG cargo arrived in Swinoujscie in July 2020, so more than four years after the terminal became operational. It took almost twice as long as at the beginning to reach the second hundred, just 28 months. One hundred more cargoes were received by ORLEN at Świnoujście over the next 20 months.

A further increase in LNG imports and the development of the company’s operations in this segment will be enabled, among other things, by the completion of the expansion of the LNG Terminal and the commissioning of the second Polish gas port in the Gulf of Gdansk, planned for 2028. As a result of these investments, the combined annual capacity of both facilities will reach over 14 bcm of natural gas in a volatile state.

Source: PortalMorski.pl