An investment of around 80 million euros which will allow the Livorno offshore regasifier to extend its useful life by at least 10 years. This, in a nutshell, is the summary of the intervention that the San Giorgio del Porto di Genova shipyard has started on the Snam Fsru regasification vessel managed and owned by the Olt Offshore Lng Toscana company (49.07% Snam, 48.24% Igneo Infrastructure Partners and 2.6% Golar Lng).
According to what was explained by Elio Ruggeri, president of Olt and managing director of Snam Fsru, the Fsru Toscana ship will be subjected to various interventions both in water (in Genoa) and in dock (in Marseille) with extraordinary maintenance of the turret, the replacement of the bearing of the anchoring system and a complete overhaul of all systems. By next October, in time for the next winter season, the ship will return to service and will be reconnected to the liquefied natural gas regasification and distribution network off the coast of Livorno.
For San Giorgio del Porto, as explained by Pierenrico Beraldo, president of Chantier Naval de Marseille (the French shipyard controlled by SGDP) and member of the Board of Directors of San Giorgio del Porto, this work is worth around 15 million euros, of which three quarters will fall on Marseille where the hull will have to move because due to its size (306 meters long) it cannot be accommodated in the dry docks of the port of Genoa. Overall, the employment effect is estimated at around 300 people destined to work on this order which will keep the ship in the Ligurian capital for just over a month.
“With the entry into operation of Piombino we are able to replace the volumes that would have arrived on Olt during this period of shutdown” explained Ruggeri on the occasion of the institutional visit on board the ship with the president of the Liguria Region Giovanni Toti, the CEO. d. of Snam, Stefano Venier, and Massimo Derchi, chief operations officer of Snam. “The Olt terminal – continued Ruggeri – has an import capacity of 3 and a half billion cubic meters out of 60 billion cubic meters of demand. In 2023 we have released the equivalent of what we imported from Russia this year. Before the war we imported almost 30 billion cubic meters from Russia, imports have reduced significantly”. The terminal has been active for almost 10 years and was “the first floating regasification terminal to operate in the world” adds Ruggeri.
Fsru Toscana is positioned approximately 22 km (12 nautical miles) off the coast between Livorno and Pisa. The gas is introduced into the national gas pipeline network via an underwater pipeline that reaches land.
The offshore regasification terminal managed by Olt is authorized to receive methane tankers with a loading capacity between 65,000 m³ and the New Panamax class (from approximately 180,000 m³), which represent approximately 90% of the fleet currently in service in the world.
The note from Snam and the Liguria Region explains that the terminal, having a system capable of correcting the Wobbe index, is able to receive the majority of LNG coming from producing countries, correcting the specifications as required by the national network Italian. Since the start of commercial operations, OLT has received cargoes from the major liquefied natural gas exporting countries such as Algeria, Angola, Cameroon, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria, Norway, Oman, Peru, Russia, Qatar, Trinidad and Tobago and the USA.
During 2023 the terminal received 40 cargoes of which 70% came from the United States (28 cargoes). The remaining 30% arrived from Algeria (5 loads), Nigeria (3 loads), Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Norway and Russia (1 load each). In total, FSRU Toscana injected 3,671,519,338 Sm3 into the network during the year, with coverage of the national requirement of approximately 6%.
