Russia’s Novatek in small-scale LNG push

Russia’s largest independent natural gas producer and the operator of the giant Yamal LNG export plant, Novatek is developing several small-scale projects and plans to launch its first such facility by the beginning of next year.

The small-scale LNG project located on the northern part of the Gulf of Finland near Russia’s Port of Vysotsk is owned 51 percent by Novatek and 49 percent by Gazprom.

The project includes two trains with the first production unit having a capacity of 660,000 tons per year.

Novatek expects to launch the first train either towards the latter part of this year or early next year, Novatek’s finance chief Mark Gyetvay told LNG World News in an interview on Tuesday at the sidelines of the Flame conference in Amsterdam.

“The project is essentially targeting bunker fuel markets in the Baltic region, Scandinavia, northern Poland, maybe even parts of Germany,” he said.

“This project is important for Novatek,” Gyetvay said adding that it gives the company the first opportunity to respond to IMO’s stricter rules on bunker fuels.

LNG truck conversions

Novatek has also recently completed a pilot program by converting mining trucks to run on LNG instead of diesel.

The company is working with Russian steel producer and mining company MMK to convert some of the latter’s Kamaz trucks to run on LNG.

“We ran a pilot program where we were doing truck-to-truck transfer of LNG and now we are going to build a series of stations so these trucks can use LNG rather than diesel,” Gyetvay said.

He added that the pilot program was successful and the company sees an opportunity to further expand the domestic market by doing these type of projects.

By Mirza Duran and Adnan Bajic