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LNG throughput in the Dutch port of Rotterdam rose 3.7 percent in 2023 as Europe continued to boost LNG imports and demand for LNG as fuel increased.

The port, home to Gasunie’s and Vopak’s Gate LNG import terminal, said that total LNG throughput reached 11.92 million tonnes last year, compared to 11.49 million tonnes in 2022 when it rose 64 percent year-on-year.

In the first half of last year, total LNG throughput reached 5.94 million tonnes, up by 9.8 percent.

Incoming LNG volumes rose 2.3 percent in the January-December period to 11.6 million tonnes, while outgoing volumes surged 111 percent to 313,000 tonnes, according to the Rotterdam port’s report.

Total cargo throughput in the port of Rotterdam last year amounted to 438.8 million tonnes, 6.1 percent less than in 2022.

The port said that LNG throughput was higher as Europe continues to import large amounts of LNG to replace pipeline imports of Russian natural gas.

There was also more bunkering in seagoing LNG tankers, it said.

The port said last month that its LNG bunkering volumes reached a record level in 2023 as prices dropped from 2022 and demand continues to increase.

Europe’s largest bunkering port reported LNG volumes of 619,243 cubic meters in 2023, a rise of 53 percent compared to 406,599 cbm in 2022 when volumes dropped considerably due to high prices.

As previously reported by LNG Prime, the Gate LNG terminal handled a record number of vessels last year mainly due to a rise in demand for LNG as fuel.

Including unloading and loading operations, the LNG terminal handled 328 vessels last year.

Gate’s small-scale jetty, which launched operations in 2016, handled record 151 vessels, loading close to 900,000 cbm of LNG last year.

Source: Lngprime.com

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This article was originally published by the Maine Morning Star.

The International Energy Agency has estimated that offshore wind could generate $1 trillion in worldwide investments in the next 15 years.

Gov. Janet Mills said, “the time has come to bring some of that investment to Maine.”

Mills announced at a press conference Tuesday afternoon that Sears Island in Searsport is the preferred site for a designated port to support the state’s budding offshore wind industry because of its economic and environmental opportunities. The turbines will be fabricated and assembled at the dedicated port.

Within Searsport, there were two potential locations: Sears Island and Mack Point. Both are in Penobscot Bay and have garnered conflicting reactions from the public. Since Sears Island is undeveloped, proponents see it as a blank canvas ready to be transformed into an offshore wind port. But opponents argued against clearing more natural land over the redevelopment of Mack Point.

Mills laid out half a dozen reasons why she believes the 941-acre Sears Island is the best choice financially and environmentally for the people of Maine, although she emphasized that she didn’t make the decision lightly.

A map of the proposed offshore wind port on Sears Island in Searsport, Maine. (AnnMarie Hilton/ Maine Morning Star)

Since the state already owns the land, it will minimize upfront costs and eliminate the potential for leasing, making Sears Island more cost-effective in the short- and long-run, Mills said. She didn’t provide an exact number, but Mills said the entire project could ultimately cost several hundreds of millions of dollars.

The island also has the required physical characteristics, namely a large, level surface with access to deep water.

Knowing that some people may be unhappy about the decision, Mills said she has hiked the island and circumnavigated it by boat so she understands the appreciation for the island. In 2009, the state put about 600 acres — two-thirds of the island — into a permanent easement. That portion will remain untouched by the port, which will be built on about 100 acres outside of the protected area.

Searsport and the surrounding region has faced economic challenges in the past decade after a paper mill closed and took more than 500 jobs with it.

“We have not recovered from that loss,” said James Gillway, town manager of Searsport. “Offshore wind will change that.”

Representatives from Maine State Chamber of Commerce, Maine Conservation Voters and Maine Audubon were also present at the press conference in support of the announcement. Sen. Chip Curry (D-Waldo) also spoke about the opportunities this will offer by creating a new industry to “strengthen families up and down the Midcoast” with good-paying jobs.

“Offshore wind will be essential to our transition away from expensive and dirty fossil fuels, and to realize this incredible opportunity, we need port infrastructure,” said Beth Ahearn, director of government affairs for Maine Conservation Voters, who was also part of the 19-member Offshore Wind Port Advisory Group.

Organized by the Maine Department of Transportation, the advisory group met six times between 2022 and 2023 to explore prospective sites and help inform the governor’s decision.

Maine relies on natural gas to support much of its energy needs, so diversifying power sources can help stabilize prices for ratepayers, said Dan Burgess, director of the Governor’s Energy Office.

“This is an investment in Maine-made, clean energy that we think will stabilize rates,” Burgess said of offshore wind. He added, “the more we can do homegrown, the better.”

In a statement, Sean Mahoney, vice president of the Conservation Law Foundation Maine, which was also part of the advisory group, said, “Offshore wind will grow our economy and help us meet our obligations to ditch polluting fossil fuels. It’s critical that this process is now moving forward and we’re one step closer to getting this clean energy on the grid.”

In November, a coalition of organized labor and environmental groups voiced support for building a new port for offshore wind, highlighting benefits such as job-creation and the use of innovation developed by Maine people. They also stressed the urgency of moving forward with the project for environmental reasons.

The state is still waiting for the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management to publish a final map showing where offshore wind can be developed in the Gulf of Maine.

In the meantime, Maine DOT will begin applying for state and federal permits. That process is expected to take about a year. Construction, however, will take multiple years. Mills estimated it could wrap up in 2029.

Even before the governor’s decision, Searsport stood out among the other options.

While the water is plenty deep, there isn’t enough space in Portland, so it wasn’t a viable option, explained Kathleen Meil, senior director of policy and partnerships for Maine Conservation Voters.

Eastport, another potential location, would require going through Tribal land and has a lot of rock, granite and other materials that would need to be blasted.

“So, that leaves us with Searsport,” Meil said in an interview with Maine Morning Star last week.

Source: Energynews.us

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Daily Standup Top Stories

Two Wind Farms Received Over $100 Million To Switch Off

The post Daily Energy Standup Episode #313 – Wind Farms Paid to Stay Offline and China’s Real Estate Woes: Affecting Oil Demand Dynamics appeared first on Energy News Beat.

 

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A new report from Griffith Asia Institute, a unit of Australia’s Griffith University, shows 10 years after the launch of China’s Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) cumulative engagement tops $1 trillion with about $634 billion in construction contracts and $419 billion in non-financial investments.

The authors point out that 2023 was the first time that more than 50% of BRI engagement was through investments where Chinese investors take equity stakes as opposed to construction contracts, which are typically financed through loans provided by Chinese financial institutions or contractors, often accompanied by guarantees from the host country.

Last year Africa overtook the Middle East as the no. 1 target of BRI projects after a 114% jump in investments and a 47% jump in construction projects on the continent. Investments in Latin America and the Caribbean also doubled last year.

China’s BRI-related investment in metals and mining reached $19.4 billion in 2023 according to the study, a 158% jump compared to 2022 and the highest on record.

Minerals and metals investment focused on the green energy transition with copper making up the lion’s share of new project announcements last year, followed by sizable lithium, nickel and uranium spending under the BRI.

Apart from a giant new copper processing facility in Saudi Arabia, mining investments were focused in Indonesia and various countries in Africa and South America.

Examples include vertical integration investments by the world’s largest battery manufacturer CATL, which bought shares for a nickel mining concession in Indonesia from PT Aneka Tambang (Antam).

Lithium projects in Mali attracted investment from Chinese firms Jiangxi, Ganfeng and Hainan Mining (through the acquisition of Kodal Minerals) while Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt commissioned a lithium processing plant in Zimbabwe.

Downstream investment in battery and electric vehicle manufacturing also soared, reaching nearly $10 billion, according to the report. The largest investors under the BRI last year were CATL, accounting for more than 15% of overall spending, followed by Zijin Mining at 11%.

Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt contributed nearly 9% of the total while CMOC (formerly China Molybdenum) and Minmetals each had a 5%-plus share of the $92.4 billion total investments in 2023.

For 2024, the Griffith Asia Institute sees further growth of Chinese BRI engagement with a strong focus on country partnerships in renewable energy, resource-backed mining and related technologies including EV batteries.

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The complex architecture that connects offshore wind farms to the main power grid using high-voltage direct-current (HVDC) technologies makes them more vulnerable to cyberattacks, according to new research.

In a recent paper and presentation, researchers from Concordia University and the Hydro-Quebec Research Institute explained that offshore wind farms, particularly those that use voltage-source-converter high-voltage direct-current (VSC-HVDC) connections, require more cyber infrastructure than onshore wind farms, given that offshore farms are often dozens of kilometres from land and operated remotely.

Offshore wind farms need to communicate with onshore systems via a wide area network. Meanwhile, the turbines also communicate with maintenance vessels and inspection drones, as well as with each other.

This hybrid communication design presents multiple access points for cyberattacks. If malicious actors were able to penetrate the local area network of the converter station on the wind farm side, these actors could tamper with the system’s sensors. This tampering could lead to the replacement of actual data with false information. As a result, electrical disturbances would affect the offshore wind farm at the points of common coupling.

According to the researchers, these disturbances could trigger poorly dampened power oscillations from the offshore wind farms when all the offshore wind farms are generating their maximum output. If these cyber-induced electrical disturbances are repetitive and match the frequency of the poorly dampened power oscillations, the oscillations could be amplified.

These amplified oscillations might then be transmitted through the HVDC system, potentially reaching and affecting the stability of the main power grid. While existing systems usually have redundancies built in to protect them against physical contingencies, such protection is rare against cyber security breaches.

“The system networks can handle events like router failures or signal decays. If there is an attacker in the middle who is trying to hijack the signals, then that becomes more concerning,” Jun Yan, co-author of the study, said in a media statement.

Yan added that considerable gaps exist in the industry, both among manufacturers and utilities. While many organizations are focusing on corporate issues such as data security and access controls, much is to be done to strengthen the security of operational technologies.

He noted that even though Concordia is leading the push for international standardization efforts, the work is just beginning.

“There are regulatory standards for the US and Canada, but they often only state what is required without specifying how it should be done,” Yan said. “Researchers and operators are aware of the need to protect our energy security, but there remain many directions to pursue and open questions to answer.”

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KoBold Metals, backed by a coalition of billionaires including Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, is expanding its footprint in Zambia after inking a deal with Midnight Sun Mining (TSX-V: MMA) to jointly explore the Dumbwa target on the Canadian miner’s Solwezi copper project.

The US-based startup aims to earn a 75% interest in the Dumbwa portion of Solwezi by spending $15 million in exploration and making cash payments totalling $500,000 over four and a half years.

“We look forward to KoBold applying their groundbreaking exploration approach to the Dumbwa Target and moving this important Zambian copper asset toward development together, which we view as perfectly timed to coincide with an upcoming phase of unprecedented global copper demand,” Midnight Sun chief executive Al Fabbro said in the statement.

KoBold Metals Africa CEO Mfikeyi Makayi said the Dumbwa target hosted “intriguing” copper-in-soil anomalies and a structural setting comparable to other major deposits in the region.

“The KoBold sediment-hosted copper team has decades of experience working in the African Copperbelt, which we will combine with our library of analytical tools and proprietary technology to aggressively explore at Dumbwa,” Makati said.

KoBold has an established presence in Zambia, including its flagship Mingomba project for which it is currently completing resource definition drilling and a pre-feasibility study.

Earlier this month the California-based firm said recent drilling at Mingomba had confirmed the “huge” size of the deposit.

It noted the asset was shaping up to be “extraordinary”, according to KoBold president Josh Goldman, who said the potential of the discovery compared to that of the Kamoa-Kakula mine, owned by Ivanhoe Mines and China’s Zijin Mining. This operation, located just across the border in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), produced almost 400,000 tonnes of copper last year.

Beyond copper

KoBold is not just focused on copper, but rather all minerals and metals considered critical for the energy transition.

It began its quest for battery metals began almost four years ago in Canada, after it acquired rights to the area in northern Quebec, just south of Glencore’s Raglan nickel mine, where it detected lithium.

The startup is now advancing 60 active projects spanning four continents, Africa, North America, Australia and Asia.

Using artificial intelligence, Kobold aims to create a “Google Maps” of the Earth’s crust, with a special focus on finding copper, cobalt, nickel and lithium deposits. It collects and analyzes multiple streams of data — from old drilling results to satellite imagery — to better understand where new deposits might be found.

Algorithms applied to the data collected determine the geological patterns that indicate a potential deposit of cobalt, which occurs naturally alongside nickel and copper.

The technology, KoBold said, can locate resources that may have eluded more traditional geologists and can help miners decide where to acquire land and drill.

Source: Mining.com

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Last April, Germany shut down its last three nuclear power stations, marking the end of the country’s atomic age.
Berlin has unveiled plans to spend €16 billion on 10 gigawatts (GW) of new gas-fired power plants in a major overhaul of the country’s energy grid.
Germany is also abandoning its short-lived love affair with coal.

Last April, Germany shut down its last three nuclear power stations, marking the end of the country’s atomic age. The controversial decision came at a time when Europe and the German public was beginning to warm up to nuclear energy in the wake of the continent’s energy crisis following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. 

“We will need more electric power in the future. That’s a fact. And 6% can be a lot to miss when there is nothing new [to replace it]. We’d be losing 6% when we really will need more,”German Chancellor Olaf Scholz told Deutsche Welle in 2022 shortly after the invasion.

Back then, Germany and scores of European nations were seriously rethinking their nuclear phaseout strategies with over 80% of the German public in favor of extending the lifespan of the country’s existing nuclear reactors. The Washington Post even reported that Germany was repairing coal mines and power plants that were mothballed for more than a decade in what was dubbed a “spring” for Germany’s coal sector. Previously, the country had set a goal to phase out coal-generated electricity by 2038.

But with Germany and Europe having little trouble securing ample new gas supplies, mainly from the United States, the country’s ruling coalition has suddenly changed its tune. Scholz is now adamant that “nuclear energy is over” and the issue is “a dead horse in Germany” after facing criticism from members of the Free Democrats party who warned that suddenly ditching nuclear energy would only lead to burning more fossil fuels. “Anyone who wanted to build new nuclear power plants would need 15 years and would have to spend €15-€20 billion each,” Scholz went on. Two years ago, German politicians vehemently denounced the opposition’s and the EU’s attempt to label nuclear energy as sustainable.

Well, Scholz’s critics were right on the money. Berlin has unveiled plans to spend €16 billion on 10 gigawatts (GW) of new gas-fired power plants in a major overhaul of the country’s energy grid. The  governing coalition has announced that the new strategy is “in addition to the consistent expansion of renewable energies,” and is key to providing steady power supplies “even in times where there is little sun and wind.” The government has touted the fossil gas power plants as “modern, highly flexible and climate-friendly” because they will, subsequently, be converted to run on hydrogen in the mid-to-late 2030s. State-owned, multinational energy company Uniper has lauded the move, saying that “swift action is urgently needed because the approval process and the actual construction of power plants and storage facilities will take several years.“Germany is now a leading advocate phasing out nuclear energy at an EU level.

As you might expect, environmental groups have come out swinging, with Greenpeace denouncing the strategy as a “perfect example of how the hype around hydrogen is just a smokescreen for more fossil gas.”

On a purely emissions standpoint, nuclear energy is cleaner than natural gas because It produces zero carbon emissions; the lifecycle emissions of nuclear energy are significantly lower than in gas-based generation and it also doesn’t produce other noxious greenhouse gasses. Unfortunately, several high-profile nuclear accidents including Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima will probably remain etched in the public psyche for decades, if not centuries, to come making nuclear power the indelible dark sheep in the global energy mix. Natural gas is viewed much more favorably.

Back To Renewable Energy

Germany is also abandoning its short-lived love affair with coal. Last year, the country’s giant power firm, LEAG, announced it will convert its lignite-fired thermal power plants into Europe’s largest green energy hub, with a capacity between 7 GW and 14 GW. LEAG has a target to install between 7 GW and 14 GW of wind and solar energy capacity; 3 GWh of storage capacity and 2 GW for green hydrogen production in the Lusatia region in Eastern Germany by 2040.

But Germany is hardly the only European nation that has rekindled its hatred for ‘dirty’ fossil fuels. French energy giant Engie recently announced plans to build a 500 megawatt gas plant near the city of Nijmegen in the Netherlands on the site of a former coal-fired generator. Engie says the facility will be a “hybrid plant” and could be powered by hydrogen in the future.

The United States’ natural gas and LNG bonanza is certainly helping Europe turn its nose up on carbon-heavy fossil fuels: With exports averaging 11.6 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) during the first half of 2023, and ~70% of exports going to Europe and much of the balance to Asia, the U.S. is now the world’s largest LNG exporter.

Source: Oilprice.com

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