Royal Dutch Shell will provide Jordan with 59.13tn British thermal units of liquefied natural gas (LNG) per year over the next two years, an official has said.
“Royal Dutch Shell has won a two-year contract to provide us with LNG in 2016 and in 2017,” the country’s National Electric Power Company (NEPCO ) Director General Abdel Fattah Daradkeh told The Jordan Times recently.
The 59.13 trillion British thermal units of LNG a year cover about 40% of Jordan’s annual electricity generation needs, Daradkeh said.
Under the two-year deal with Shell, the company will provide Jordan with 18 to 20 shipments of LNG per year. Each shipment will be about 3.2 to 3.3tn British thermal units, according to Daradkeh.
In July, NEPCO floated a tender to buy 59.13tn British thermal units of LNG a year for a period of four years.
“We awarded the contract to Shell for two years only as few companies submitted bids to supply us with LNG for four years. In addition, our main objective was to get supplies for two years at this stage,” the official explained.
Jordan is also eyeing imports of natural gas from Egypt following the discovery of the giant Zohr gas field off the country’s Mediterranean coast, Daradkeh revealed.
“There is strong cooperation with our brotherly Egyptians in this regard and we are looking forward to importing gas from the field,” he added.
In addition to the two-year deal with Shell, Jordan signed a separate agreement with Shell earlier this year, under which the company provides the Kingdom with 150mn cubic feet of LNG per day for the next five years.
“We greatly rely on LNG for power generation at this stage. In addition to the deals with Shell, we also floated a tender to buy LNG from international spot markets,” Daradkeh said.
