OREANDA-NEWS. Gazprom Marketing & Trading (GM&T) completed its first board-to-board transshipment of LNG in the open sea. Over 130 thousand cubic meters of LNG was transferred from the Pskov gas carrier to the Yenisei LNG tanker in the Malaysian territorial waters.

Special-purpose flexible cryogenic pipes are used during a ship-to-ship gas transfer, which is a technically complex operation. It is important to take into account some factors, such as a specific geographic position, direction of streams, wind strength and wave height, to make sure the operation runs safely.

“Ship-to-ship transfer in the open sea allows dividing the total gas volumes into some smaller bulks, which makes it easier to subsequently ship them by gas carriers of lesser transportation capacity and offload to the floating regasification terminals as well as to perform the bunkering operation straight in the sea. It significantly improves the supply logistics, facilitates the opportunities for the company and increases its effectiveness,” said Nikolai Grigoriev, Director of Global Shipping and Logistics, GM&T.

GM&T is Gazprom’s wholly-owned company dealing with Russian LNG sales abroad and LNG deliveries from third countries.

Gazprom accounts for nearly 5 per cent in the global LNG production supplying LNG to ten countries: Japan, Korea, China, India, Taiwan, the UK, the USA, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Mexico. Gazprom plans to expand its share in the global LNG market to 15 per cent, when the Vladivostok LNG and Baltic LNG projects come onstream.

The Company’s tanker fleet comprises five chartered gas carriers: Ob River (cargo capacity – 149 thousand cubic meters), Lena River and Yenisei River (155 thousand cubic meters each), and Velikiy Novgorod and Pskov (170.2 thousand cubic meters each).