LNG Croatia Postpones Deadline - Again

LNG Croatia said this week that it has postponed the deadline for closing the second round of its open season to book capacity at the project from September 28 until to December 20 2018. It said it would notify all registered applicants of the new time schedule. The deadline has already been repeatedly postponed since mid-January 2018.

"Since LNG Croatia has received additional requests from interested terminal users to extend the submission deadline, LNG Croatia in cooperation with Plinacro and FGSZ aligned a new time schedule for the Open Season procedure," it said September 26. Plinacro and FGSZ are respectively the Croatian and Hungarian gas transmission system operators (TSOs).

Another factor may explain the deferral: state-owned LNG Croatia has yet to respond to NGW, or publicly say on its website, what happened with its tender for the charter of a floating regas terminal.

It had set a deadline of 2pm local time on September 14 for submission of the bids for the charter of such a Floating Storage and Regasification Unit (FSRU) from specialist shipowners. But nothing has been said since - suggesting either the bids were too few or unsatisfactory, or that it requires more time to analyse them.

Just as the deadline has been kicked down the road, so too has the final investment decision - which earlier this year was confidently forecast to happen around April 2018. Project cost has been estimated at around €360mn ($420mn) of which almost one-third would come in the form of an EU grant.