MOSCOW: The Greek private limited company Gastrade, owned by the Greek conglomerate Coupelouzos Group, has been licensed to develop a floating storage and regasification unit (FSRU), which would allow for the import of liquefied natural gas (LNG) from various sources, including the United States, to northeastern Greece (Energypress.gr, December 22, 2016). Located off the coast of Alexandroupolis, the FSRU system is linked to a 29 kilometer subsea and onshore pipeline (25 km offshore and 4 km onshore), with a daily capacity of 16.8 million cubic meters of gas per day. Gastrade plans to import LNG through this project into the country, whereas the Monaco-registered LNG ship-owner GasLog will be responsible for shipping the gas.
According to current plans, the imported LNG will be regasified at Alexandroupolis and transported onward via the so-called Vertical Corridor, which will extend all the way to the Bulgarian market. From there, those volumes could supply other countries in Central and Eastern Europe or even Turkey, assuming that proves to be economically viable. But if that happens, those LNG imports might end up competing in the Bulgarian and Turkish markets with future gas volumes from Azerbaijan’s offshore Shah Deniz Stage 2 production project. The FSRU in Alexandroupolis is included on the European Union’s list of Projects of Common Interest (PCI), which means that this project is eligible to be financed (340 million euros, equivalent to $367 million) by the European Investment Bank (EIB) between 2016 and 2018 (Eib.org, accessed January 11, 2017). It bears pointing out that Gastrade’s parent company, Coupelozos Group, had earlier also founded Prometheus Gas, a joint company parity (50-50) owned by Coupelozos and GazpromExport (100 percent subsidiary of Gazprom). The main scope of Prometheus Gas S.A. is the import and marketing of Russian natural gas on the Greek market. The entity is Coupelozos Group’s sole gas import arm (Copelouzos.gr, accessed January 30).
