Vitol Says LNG Sales Up in 2017

International oil trading group Vitol has said in an annual results statement March 26 how much LNG it traded last year.

The private company founded 52 years ago in Rotterdam said: "In LNG, where we have long had a presence, the market is evolving as anticipated and our volumes grew commensurately to 7.4mn mt" in 2017.  Its previous three annual statements did not disclose LNG sales.

At IP Week in London last month, when one LNG executive said that five leading western traders had sold about 20mn mt LNG last year, double their 2015 level, Vitol's head of LNG Pablo Galante Escobar added that Vitol alone accounted for 7.5mn mt  of global 2017 LNG sales. Among deals that it inked last year were ones with Angola LNG and Gazprom Marketing & Trading.

Vitol said its 2017 turnover increased to $181bn, from $152bn in 2016, but gave no figures for net profits. It said its traded oil volume "held steady at just over 7mn barrels/day." 

Primarily a trader and refiner, Vitol also said its main upstream focus in 2018 remains development of the OCTP (Sankofa and Gye Nyame fields) oil and gas project offshore Ghana, operated by Eni, where first oil was achieved in May 2017 and is "now rising to the anticipated 45,000 b/d, with gas to be delivered locally later this year." Eni CEO Claudio Descalzi said mid-March its target to bring associated OCTP gas to shore is June 2018.

Two weeks ago Vitol said that Russell Hardy is to become CEO, while long-time CEO Ian Taylor will become chairman.