RAS LAFFAN, Qatar, 24 March 2004 — Qatar unveiled yesterday what it said was the world’s largest LNG processing facility at this giant Gulf industrial city which has sent the first supplies of liquefied natural gas (LNG) to India.
Emir Sheikh Hamad ibn Khalifa Al-Thani lifted up a light bulb in the shape of an oil drop to inaugurate the train three project, which has seen $2.3 billion of investment in both Qatar and India.
“This is the world’s largest LNG train with a production capacity of 4.7 million tons per annum,” said Qatari Energy Minister Abdullah ibn Hamad Al-Attiyah.
“The Petronet-RasGas deal has been a groundbreaking agreement due to the sheer size of supplies involved ... and the vision that the Qatari and Indian governments share to transfer a safe and reliable and environmentally friendly source of energy from one country with an abundance of supply to another with a huge and growing demand,” he said.
All output of train three, which refers to the series of gas treatment and cooling units, will go toward fulfilling a July 1999 agreement to supply 7.5 million tons of LNG per year, over a period of 25 years to the terminal at Dahej in the northwestern Gujarat state. It will meet energy demand in that state and the southern Kerala state.
But both sides were already looking beyond this deal given India’s enormous gas and energy needs. B.K. Chaturvedi, India’s deputy energy minister and Petronet chairman, said the LNG receiving capacity at Dahej was being doubled to 10 million tons and that new terminals were being built in the southern cities of Cochin and Mangalore to meet the demand of refineries and power plants there.
He said RasGas, 24 March 2004 — 63 percent owned by Qatar Petroleum, 25 percent by energy giant ExxonMobile and the remainder by Japanese and South Korean companies — would be a favored partner for the Cochin project.
“There is a lot of suppressed demand, people do not approach us because there is no availability,” he told AFP after the ceremony. “Refineries and many other sectors want to improve the economies of their operations because this fuel is cheaper.”
He said India has a daily demand of 120 million cubic meters (4.238 billion cubic feet) of natural gas but that only 70 million of that was being met today. India’s goal is for natural gas to meet 20 percent of its energy needs by 2025, up from eight percent now, said the minister.
Qatar pumped $1.3 billion into the project. India spent $600 million to build the Dahej terminal and 200 million on pipelines. The remaining money goes to leasing tankers. Qatar and its partners are hoping the India deal will open the door to other promising Asian markets like China, Pakistan and Thailand and help them complete projects to supply the US market with Qatari LNG.
Meanwhile, Qatar signed yesterday a $6 billion memorandum of understanding with South African-US partnership Sasol-Chevron for three gas-to-liquid (GTL) projects, Attiyah announced. One project involves the $1.4 billion expansion of a GTL plant to 100,000 barrels per day (bpd), while another is a $4.5-billion project to build an integrated facility to produce 130,000 bpd of GTL, the minister said.
