iMetal

Finland has chartered a floating liquefied natural gas (LNG) storage and regasification vessel (FSRU) from Houston-based Excelerate Energy to process LNG imports starting in Q4 to replace Russian gas supplies. Moscow cut off supplies on 21 May in response to payment disputes coupled with fallout from Finland’s NATO bid.
Excelerate, a US LNG company headquartered in The Woodlands, Texas, will deploy its FSRU Exemplar to the Baltic Sea region under a 10-year contract signed in Helsinki on 20 May with a subsidiary of Gasgrid Finland Oy in Helsinki, both parties announced.
The Exemplar will provide regasification services to southern Finland and to Estonia under a cooperation agreement signed on 4 May in which the two countries’ gas transmission operators agreed to lease the FSRU jointly. Finland is expected to bear, according to Reuters, 80% of the estimated cost at $487 million) of the decade-long rental, plus additional volume-used costs.
State-owned Gasgrid Finland and Estonia’s gas transmission operator Elering AS also agreed that the Exemplar would spend the winter in an Estonian port if port infrastructure in Finland was not completed in time.
“Elering’s vision has always been a unified Estonian-Finnish electricity and gas market,” the Estonian transmission operator’s CEO Taavi Veskimägi said in a statement on Elering’s website, adding that the Baltic neighbors have already spent nearly $1.1 billion constructing various links to tie their electricity and gas transmission systems together.
“The common LNG terminal is the next step … to ensure the security of supply for Estonian and Finnish consumers,” Veskimägi said.
According to Excelerate, the FSRU has 150900 m3 of LNG storage capacity and boasts a regasification capacity exceeding 5 Bcm per year. Gasgrid Finland added that the vessel at capacity represents 1,050 GWh of energy and that it would be loaded with LNG imports two or three times a month.