At the Neptun shipyard in Rostock, a tank for the liquefied natural gas drive is installed in the cruise ship “Costa Smeralda”.
Photo: dpa/Bernd Wüstneck
So far there is not a single terminal for liquefied natural gas LNG in Germany. But that should change quickly now. As a reaction to the Ukraine war, Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) announced in the Bundestag on Sunday that two LNG terminals would be built in Germany. He named Brunsbüttel and Wilhelmshaven as locations.
The announcement came as a surprise on the North Sea coast of Lower Saxony. There has been a debate about building an LNG terminal in Wilhelmshaven since the 1970s. Most recently, Uniper (formerly Eon) tried in vain for two years to acquire enough customers to start building an import terminal for tankers. Depending on the technology and volume, the construction costs are likely to be between 500 million and one billion euros. In November 2020, the project was then put on hold again. The Uniper subsidiary LTW announced at the time that there would not be a terminal in Wilhelmshaven until further notice. Uniper is majority owned by the Finnish energy group Fortum.
In Scholz’s speech, the almost never-ending story in Germany about the fuel LNG continues. LNG (Liquefied Natural Gas) stands for liquefied natural gas. It could significantly reduce emissions at sea and on the coast. According to earlier information from the Hamburg Economics Authority, emissions of sulfur and fine dust are reduced by 99 percent compared to previously used fuels. Nitrogen oxides are reduced by 80 percent and CO2 by 20 percent. In the maritime industry and in shipping circles, LNG is therefore seen as a viable bridging technology between the »black« fuels used today and the »green« hydrogen of the future. The world’s largest inland port in Duisburg wants to open a new container terminal in 2023, which will then even rely on hydrogen. The transport of hydrogen is similar to that of LNG.
So far, there has been a lack of demand from the economy for liquid gas in this country. It is true that freighters and cruise ships with modern large dual-fuel engines can already use LNG today. Depending on your point of view, this fails because of the stinginess of many shipowners or the tough global competition and thus the high price. Heavy fuel oil and marine diesel are far cheaper than LNG – and in the not foreseeable future “green” hydrogen or other technically possible alternative fuels. In addition, ships with a complex tank system would have to be converted for LNG. Shipyards would love to do that, but it comes at a cost. After all, large shipping companies such as Hapag Lloyd or Aida have put the first new ships with LNG propulsion into operation.
The low real demand in Germany, which mainly comes from inland vessels, is mainly covered by refrigerated transporters that are loaded in Rotterdam, Zeebrugge and Świnoujście. “In order to make the environmentally friendly LNG also interesting for shipping, the first bunker station in the port of Cologne for inland waterway vessels went into operation at the end of October 2019,” says a spokesman for the Bonn engineering office Knauber.
For liquefaction, manufacturers cool down the natural gas under atmospheric pressure to around minus 160 degrees Celsius. To supply the handful of LNG import terminals in Germany, the liquefied natural gas is transported several thousand nautical miles to Europe. In the EU, Spain has the most LNG capacities. And the largest European tanker fleet sails under the Spanish flag. According to media reports, the USA overtook Algeria as the main supplier of the six terminals in Spain at the end of 2021.
So far, Japan and South Korea in particular have relied on LNG to ensure their energy supply. Due to their geographic location, both countries have little access to natural gas via pipelines. Together with China, they account for two-thirds of global LNG demand, according to consulting firm Enerdata. The countries are mainly supplied from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. However, with the commissioning of new LNG plants, US LNG exports increased by a quarter in 2020. Australia and, to a lesser extent, Russia have also been exporting more and more LNG for years.
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Now liquid gas should help Germany to solve its dependency on Russia. Experts estimate the construction time at two to three years if the federal government succeeds in shortening the planning approval process, as provided for in the coalition agreement. However, the capacity of the two terminals planned by Chancellor Scholz, with 10 to 15 billion cubic meters of natural gas, would not even be sufficient to replace a third of today’s imports from Russia.