DOnly a few people knew the term LNG a year ago, but now the abbreviation stands for hope for warm living rooms and uninterrupted industrial production. In order to be able to access “liquefied natural gas” instead of Russian pipeline gas, the federal government has chartered four special ships that transport the deep-frozen gas to Germany and then heat it up again and thus return it to the gas state. FSRU – Floating Storage and Regasification Unit – is the name of the special ships that will land at the LNG terminals that are being set up in a hurry.
However, a private project is faster than the state: On Wednesday, Deutsche Regas reported the arrival of the “Neptune” in Mukran Port on the island of Rügen. This is where the 280 meter long special ship makes a stopover on its way to the industrial port of Lubmin. Before that, the ship’s draft had to be reduced from 9.60 to 5.20 metres. A pipe adapter will also be installed so that the FSRU can be precisely connected to the pipe system in Germany. The Lubmin/Greifswald location is an important hub in the German natural gas network.
From a technical point of view, the terminal in Lubmin could start on December 1st, as Stephan Knabe, head of the Regas supervisory board, assured a few days ago. However, objections can still be submitted to the State Office for Agriculture and the Environment in Schwerin until November 28th. “As the approval authority, we have always emphasized that we stand for a legally secure procedure,” commented Till Backhaus, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania’s Minister for the Environment. Deutsche Regas GmbH & Co. KGaA was founded in April 2022. The company is continuing the plans of the company’s founders for a 2016 hydrogen project that was adapted to LNG.
