South Hook in South West Wales — Europe’s largest liquefied natural gas (LNG) receiving terminal — is fully commissioned with the completion of its second phase, South Hook LNG Terminal Co. LTC said Tuesday.

The terminal is part of the Qatargas 2 project and has processing capacity of 15.6 million metric tons per year of LNG and is capable of delivering up to 21 billion cubic meters (bcm) of gas per year into the National Transmission System (NTS). South Hook is owned by a United Kingdom joint venture of Qatar Petroleum (67.5%), ExxonMobil (24.15%) and Total (8.35%).

“South Hook demonstrates a major strengthening of the strategic partnership between Qatar and the UK. It is the first Qatari involvement abroad in a downstream terminal and is a major component of Qatar’s LNG supply portfolio as the world’s leading LNG supplier,” South Hook said.

“The South Hook Terminal’s ability to import LNG is important to the UK’s long-term energy needs and the UK now has an additional major gas entry point in the West for the national grid gas system.”

Train 5 of Qatargas 2 went online last year (see Daily GPI, Sept. 9, 2009). Qatargas 2 links gas production, liquefaction, shipping and regasification infrastructure. In addition to Trains 4 and 5, the Qatargas 2 joint venture encompasses a fleet of Q-Max and Q-Flex carriers as well as the South Hook terminal.

Atlantic Basin LNG trade has strengthened as a linkage between U.S. and European gas markets. Last week. J.P. Morgan announced that it had taken regasification capacity at the Sabine Pass terminal in Louisiana and said it plans to develop a gas business in Europe that is similar to what it has in the United States (see Daily GPI, April 5). “It’s becoming more obvious to us that trading North American gas and trading European gas independently from one another doesn’t make sense, although five years ago the two really did trade independently from one another,” Paul Posoli, J.P. Morgan head of global power, gas, coal and emissions, told NGI.

Last week Yemen LNG began producing LNG from its second train. With the completion of Train 2 at the LNG terminal at Balhaf on the Gulf of Aden, Yemen LNG production will soon reach design capacity of 6.7 million metric tons per year, the company said (see Daily GPI, April 6).

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