Puerto de la Luz LNG Terminal

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Puerto de la Luz LNG Terminal is a proposed LNG terminal in Spain's Canary Islands.

Location

The terminal's proposed location is at Puerto de la Luz in Las Palmas, the capital city of Gran Canaria Island (Canary Islands).

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Project Details

• Operator:
• Owner: Totisa Holdings
• Parent company: Totisa Holdings
• Location: Puerto de la Luz, Gran Canaria, Las Palmas, Spain (Canary Islands)
• Coordinates: 28.139483, -15.423414 (approximate)
• Capacity:
• Status: Shelved
• Cost: €90 million (US$102 million)
• Type: Import
• Start Year: 2023

Note: mtpa = million tonnes per year; bcfd = billion cubic feet per day; bcm/y = billion cubic meters per year

Background

In July 2018, Totisa Holdings, a newcomer to Spain's energy market, approached the Port Authority of Las Palmas with a proposal for an LNG terminal at Puerto de la Luz in Las Palmas' port area. The proposed terminal complex would include LNG storage tanks, a regasification plant, bunkering facilities, and a gas-fired power plant.

Spain's leading electric utility Endesa, the national gas distributor Enagás, and Canary Islands-based fuel distributor DISA all placed competing bids for the project, with the latter two submitting a joint bid. Early reports indicated that gas from the terminal could eventually be supplied to the Barranco de Tirajana power station in Juan Grande, 50km to the south.

In June 2019, the Port Authority voted unanimously to accept Totisa Holdings' bid for the €90 million project. Following unsuccessful legal and procedural challenges from the unsuccessful bidders, the project appeared ready to move ahead as of December 2020.

If constructed, the Puerto de la Luz Terminal would be the first LNG terminal in the Canary Islands, outpacing Endesa's long-proposed but not-yet-completed Tenerife LNG Terminal and Gran Canaria LNG Terminal.

In May 2022, Spain's Council of Ministers approved a provision acknowledging the Canary Islands' opposition to constructing any regasification facilities on the islands. The measure approved by Spain's national government is in accordance with a previous commitment made by the Canaries' regional government to only use gas as a bridge fuel to green hydrogen, without the construction of new infrastructure. As a result, the Puerto de la Luz LNG project appears to be shelved as of June 2022.

Opposition

Environmentalists and politicians – including Spain's Secretary of Energy, the national Commissioner of Markets and Competition, and the president of Las Palmas' city council – have long questioned the wisdom of building an LNG terminal in the Canary Islands, based on the terminal's uncertain economic viability and the availability of alternative renewable energy sources.

Opposition groups have cited the low utilization rates among Spain's LNG terminals to call into question the necessity of such extensive LNG infrastructure. According to Food and Water Europe in 2019 (prior to the re-opening of El Musel LNG Terminal), "Since 2008, all LNG terminals (except for Mugardos) have been expanded and the total regasification capacity has increased by 8%, despite a decline in gas demand...even though the utilisation rate of Spain’s LNG regasification capacity was at only ~23% on average between January 2012 and March 2019, same as the low EU average during the same time period! The need to have so much LNG regasification capacity is questionable and best illustrated with the El Musel LNG Terminal (7bcm/y and a 300,000m³ storage capacity) which was completed in 2012 and then directly put into 'hibernation', 'until demand picks up'. The terminal has not been used since then. Despite large underutilization, Spain was the 5th biggest LNG importer with the 5th biggest liquefaction capacities worldwide in 2018, and for both cases number 1 in Europe (followed by France). Since at least 2016, Spain repeatedly imported cargoes of fracked US gas through its LNG terminals."