Allseas Gets Balticconnector Job
Finnish state owned Baltic Connector said March 29 that it and partner Estonia’s Elering have signed a contract with Allseas to lay the subsea section of the Balticconnector gas pipeline.
Balticconnector will be a 150-km bidirectional pipe, of which 80 km will be subsea, linking Inga in Finland and Paldiski in Estonia.
Baltic Connector and Estonian grid operator Elering are responsible for its construction and took its final investment decision October 18, 2016.
Baltic Connector has now said the total cost of the project is some €300mn, of which EU funding will provide €206mn (or some 69%). Back in 2016, the European Commission said it would fund the project up to €187.5mn.
Installation work will start in summer 2018 with seabed preparations. The subsea installation will be carried out by Allseas starting summer 2019 and is expected to be completed in autumn 2019, after which the next phase will be to prepare the subsea pipeline for commercial use.
The "agreement is a significant milestone for the Balticconnector project and shows that the project is proceeding as planned," according to Baltic Connector. The goal of the project is to enable the opening up the Finnish gas market in 2020. Constructing the Balticconnector offshore pipeline is one of the key parts in linking the Finnish and Baltic gas markets and will integrating them with the EU’s common energy market, it said. Currently Finland has only access to Russian piped gas and small-scale LNG imports.
Elering’s chairman Taavi Veskimagi said the whole project is expected to be completed by 2020: "Construction procurements for the Kiili-Paldiski gas pipeline and Paldiski and Puiatu compression stations that will be built on Estonian territory within the Balticconnector project are in the final stages. This means that the main construction agreements will hopefully be signed in the near future, and actual construction work will begin on all objects.” This week Corinth Pipeworks in Greece began producing the offshore pipes for Balticconnector.
Gazprom-owned Nord Stream 2 announced April 2017 it had awarded the NS2 offshore pipelay contract to Allseas; however so far Germany is the only one of five countries along its subsea route to have fully approved the pipeline's planned route. Delays or rejections by any of the others could set back Gazprom's schedule of having the pipe fully completed by end-2019.