Japanese companies remain the largest importers of Sakhalin LNG, but China’s share is growing. This was stated by the head of the marketing and sales department of the operator of the Sakhalin-2 project, Leonid Aleksandrov.
“Our project supplies LNG mainly to Northeast Asia, a certain geographic region, a segment of the global market. We have been present in this market since March 2009, when the first batch of LNG from our plant was sent to our main buyer: Tokyo Gas and Tokyo Electric. And since then, traditionally, Japan remains our key sales market; “About 60% of our supplies are delivered reliably and safely to Japan.” – saying Leonid Alexandrov on the “Sakhalin Oil and Gas” forum, TASS reports.
The agency provides data from a presentation by a representative of Sakhalin Energy LLC: in 2023, 57.5% of LNG sales from the Sakhalin-2 project came from Japan, 16.2% of sales came from South Korea and another 26.3% from China.
“In recent (years) we have dynamically increased and expanded cooperation with China; today this is also a very important direction of supply, about 25-26%.” — added Leonid Alexandrov.
He noted that last year the volume of global LNG trade reached 401 million tons and 65% of demand is concentrated in Asia: “This is a key market for LNG and particularly dynamic.”
Most of Sakhalin’s LNG is supplied under long-term contracts. Japan receives 9% of imported gas from Sakhalin-2. However, considerable volumes of the project ended up on the spot market when the Dutch-British Shell withdrew from the project in 2022. Its volumes are sold to China.
Kpler released data that in April shipments to China even surpassed shipments to Japan. It is known that in 2023 Sakhalin-2 exported 10 million tons, 6 million tons of which were sent to Japan. Japanese companies Mitsui and Mitsubishi retained their 12.5 and 10% stakes in the Sakhalin operator.
As reported EADaily In February, Sakhalin Energy LLC offered Chinese companies 12 cargoes (1 million tons) of LNG per year for three to five years starting in August 2024. We are talking about a medium-term contract. At the same time, Japanese companies were not invited to participate in the contest, an S&P Global source said. Obviously, we are talking about the volumes of LNG that Shell previously received. Its share in Sakhalin-2 was 27.5%.
