Second Gas Cargo Heads to Finland's LNG Terminal After Pipeline Rupture
A tanker carrying Norwegian liquefied natural gas (LNG) is set to arrive at Finland's Inkoo terminal overnight, vessel tracking data showed on Friday, making it the second cargo since the Oct. 8 outage of a Finnish-Estonian gas pipeline.
The Arctic Princess, carrying natural gas from the Arctic Hammerfest LNG plant, signaled its arrival at Inkoo on Friday at 2300 GMT, LSEG shipping data showed, corresponding to Saturday morning at 0100 EET in local time.
The tanker loaded in Norway on Sept. 17 but sat off the Danish coast since Sept. 23 as so-called floating storage, a maneuver employed by cargo owners to hold out for higher prices amid full onshore storage tanks and as yet muted winter demand.
The Arctic Princess' arrival fits a late spot slot for a reduced capacity of 400-500 gigawatt hours (GWh), around half of a standard slot, offered by the terminal operators following the outage of the Balticconnector gas pipeline.
The gas link between Finland and Estonia ruptured in early October, with Finnish police suspecting a broken anchor likely belonging to a Chinese cargo ship to have caused the damage.
The pipeline is set to be out of operation all winter until April at least, leaving Finland reliant of deliveries of LNG to cover its domestic gas demand.
(Reuters - Reporting by Nora Buli, editing by Terje Solsvik)