French LNG imports slump 57% in June

French LNG imports slumped more than 57% month on month to about 1.06 million mt in June, with all four of the country's regasification terminals under maintenance and following a fire at Freeport LNG's Texas facility.

About 55% of the June imports came from the US, around 16% from Algeria and nearly 14% from Russian, according to Xplore, LNG ship and volume tracking software from S&P Global Commodity Insights.

France imported about 2.5 million mt of LNG in May, with 35% of the volumes coming from Russia, 33% from the US and around 10.6% from Algeria.

Planned maintenance work across all the country's LNG regasification terminals was one of the factors contributing to lower LNG imports in the month.

France has four LNG regasification terminals: Dunkerque and Montoir-de-Bretagne in the north, and Fos Cavou and Fos Tonkin in the south. France's total regasification capacity is 33 Bcm/year according to Gas Infrastructure Europe data, the second largest in the European Union after Spain.

All four LNG import terminals in France saw periods of 100% reduction in June, according to S&P Global data. Fos Cavou saw the reduction over May 30-June 20 and Fos Tonkin over June 18-June 26. Dunkerque had planned maintenance between June 1 and 29, while Montoir-de-Bretagne had planned maintenance over June 18-July 1.

Supply was also constricted with French import facilities offline.

Freeport LNG's Texas facility, which reported a fire June 8, is one of the largest LNG liquefaction and export facilities in the US and the outage is expected to last until late 2022. France was one of the countries notably impacted by the outage. France imported about 10% of its total LNG from Freeport over January-May, according to S&P Global data.

The supply and infrastructure disruptions occurred in tandem with the suspension of Russian natural gas supplies to some European countries, leading LNG prices to rise in north and south France.

DES Northwest Europe and DES Mediterranean LNG prices climbed to $38.42/MMBtu June 30, from $21.49/MMBtu June 1.