Omers Buys into Chile LNG Terminal
Canadian public pension fund Omers said April 11 it has bought a 34.6% stake in Chilean LNG import terminal owner, GNL Quintero, its first direct infrastructure investment in South America.
Spanish gas grid Enagas, which co-owns several Latin American gas grid assets, said April 11 it sold Omers the 34.6% GLNQ stake for $341mn.
Resultant GLNQ shareholdings were confirmed by Enagas as: Chilean state oil refiner Enap 20%, Enagas directly 40%, Omers directly 29.6%, and Terminal Bahía de Quintero 10.4% (TBQ is a new joint venture owned 51.9% by Enagás and 48.1% by Omers). Omers also granted Enagas an option to buy that TBQ interest – equivalent to 5% of GNLQ - in the next 12 months.
Omers is a shareholder in Canada’s Enbridge, National Grid, and Scotia Gas Networks (UK), Spanish oil pipelines network CLH and other gas infrastructure assets worldwide. Its stakes in infrastructure are sometimes owned by its wholly-owned subsidiary Borealis Infrastructure.
Omers' entry into GLNQ was part of an arrangement that saw Oman's state Oman Oil Co divest its interest to Enagas for $191mn.
GNLQ started up in 2009 and has one of the highest utilisation rates of any LNG import terminal. It expanded regas capacity in 2015 to 5.5bn m3/yr and serves almost 100% of central Chile’s gas demand where 92% of Chile’s population lives and four-fifths of its GDP is produced. Since 2014, it has dispatched over 40,000 LNG-fuelled trucks to customers not connected to the pipeline grid. Since 2016, GNLQ´s regas also included volumes piped to Argentina over the Andes, added Omers.
Enagas said it continues to maintain operational control over GNLQ and, as a result of the deals, benefits from a net cash inflow of $150mn.
Mark Smedley