Poland’s first gas tankers to enter service next year

Two liquefied natural gas (LNG) tankers being built in South Korea for Polish state gas company PGNiG will enter service in 2023, although they will fly the French flag, the state assets ministry has confirmed in a response to a parliamentary question.

The vessels will be named “Lech Kaczyński” and “Grażyna Gęsicka” after a former Polish president and former regional development minister respectively, both of whom hailed from the current ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party, led by Lech’s identical twin Jarosław, and who both died in the 2010 Smolensk air disaster.

In total, the PGNiG group has ordered eight such gas carriers, as it seeks to boost supplies to Poland’s existing LNG terminal in Świnoujście – also named after Lech Kaczyński – and a planned new one in Gdańsk. Two more vessels will commence service in 2024 and a further four will be commissioned in 2025.

The tankers are to be chartered – not owned – by PGNiG under long-term agreements with specialised shipowning companies Knutsen OAS Shipping and Maran Gas Maritime, said deputy state assets minister Maciej Małecki.

Long-term LNG tanker charters are tailored to the US LNG offtake pattern and “reduce the overall cost of freight and avoid sharp changes in LNG freight prices,” he added, quoted by financial news service Money.pl.

According to the ministry, long-term charter also ensures that LNG units will be available for PGNiG whenever needed. It declined, however, to disclose the charter cost, saying that it is confidential corporate information. The shipowner will be responsible for manning the vessels and keeping them in proper working order.

Regarding the fact that the ships will fly the French flag, Małecki noted that, “according to PGNiG, [this] is at the discretion of the shipowner, not the charterer, taking into account the restrictions set out in the charter agreement (prohibition of the use of so-called ‘flags of convenience’)”.

But “there are no formal obstacles to employing Polish crew members on vessels chartered by PGNiG”, he added.

Each vessel will have tanks with a capacity of approximately 174,000 cubic metres, which means that the volume of cargo each vessel will be able to transport is approximately 100 million cubic metres of gas after regasification of the LNG.

The details on the tankers come as Europe braces for potential gas supply cuts this winter, foreseeing that Russia might look to limit exports. Moscow has already halted gas supplies to Poland after Warsaw refused to comply with a demand to pay in roubles.

On Tuesday, EU member states reached a political agreement to voluntarily reduce natural gas demand by 15%. Poland, which has for years been seeking to diversify its gas supplies, had expressed opposition to any compulsory cuts.

Main photo credit: Lens Envy/Flickr (under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Alicja Ptak

Alicja Ptak is senior editor at Notes from Poland and a multimedia journalist. She previously worked for Reuters.