This is the fourth post about the implications of Europe’s proposed partial ban on Russian Natural Gas. EkaLore’s BOTE articles convert complex situations into simple models to reveal whether they need attention.
This post examines raw logistics, even if we had enough tankers to replace the natural gas shortfall from a ban, would there be enough facilities to transfer that natural gas to the tankers, and take the gas off them once they reach Europe?
A large LNG production facility runs to 10-20MTons of LNG output per year. Normal production takes gas from pipelines, cools/liquefies the gas, then pumps it into LNG tankers to transport to another part of the world. There are multiple standards and details that are ignored here. There are about 600 LNG tankers of varying sizes globally.
Europe has a storage capacity of about 3,000,000,000 cubic feet of natural gas. This is a target to be filled before winter, and current European stores are estimated at 1,000,000,000,000 (1 TCF).
LNG ships, if all were fully loaded, have about 95.2 million cubic meters of gas storage capacity (2020).
A “Q-max LNG Tanker” has a capacity of about 266,000 cubic meters of LNG (equivalent to 9.4Mcf) (equivalent to 124.5Kt) and loses 2-6% per 18 days voyage. Shipping time from the Gulf of Mexico to Rotterdam is approximately 18 days. The Q-max tanker is named for ships built to be the maximum size than can dock in Qatar. An unload time is approximately 20h (14000 CM/hr) with about another 10 hours to handle docking and undocking.
A proportionate estimate for a ‘typical’ time to load a Q-max LNG Tanker (12-15 hours per 144KT ship)
High speed pumping is 2000CM/hour and 8 lines running per LNG Tanker to load. (8 x 2000 =16,000CM/hour (266,000 /16000 = 17 hours to load)
Using the nominal values of 18 days transport (2 directions) = 36 days
Load 17
Load undocking 10
Unload 20
Unload docking 10
40 days (safe number)
= 9 trips per year
Therefore, you need slightly more than 102 Q-Max-sized tankers (of which there are only 14 in the world) just to move the LNG from a site (our example uses the US Gulf of Mexico) to Europe.
Our next post will look at secondary effects. Natural Gas is used to provide basic chemicals for Fertilizer. Europe will need to react to a shortage of those feed chemicals along with gaps in energy.
If you're interested in how this situation may affect your business, we've got some ideas on what to do - www.ekalore.com/contact
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