New Delhi: State-owned GAIL India on Tuesday said it has swapped 60 per cent of the 5.8 million tonnes per annum of liquefied natural gas (LNG) it has contracted from the US as it rejigs supply portfolio in line with domestic demand.
GAIL Chairman and Managing Director B C Tripathi said the company sold a "major chunk" of the US LNG via time swaps, destination swaps and shipping optimisation.
"In all 3.5 million tonnes of LNG has been swapped," he told reporters after company's shareholders meeting here.
Under the time-swap deals, the company will buy LNG from international companies this year and sell equivalent amount of Henry Hub-indexed volumes during 2018-19.
Also, it has entered into deals to take deliveries of gas from a nearer location and in exchange given its US volumes to company closer to the origin to cut shipping costs. Tripathi said some of the time-swapped volumes have started arriving in India but refused to give details of the companies GAIL has entered into deals with.
"Innovative contracting structures such as time swap, destination swap and shipping optimisation have been executed as measures to market LNG volumes," he said.
GAIL has a deal to buy 3.5 million tonnes a year of LNG for 20 years from Cheniere Energy of the US and has also booked capacity for another 2.3 million tonnes at Dominion Energy's Cove Point liquefaction plant. The company expects US LNG supplies to begin from March/April next year, he said.
GAIL had contracted LNG from the US to meet the demand of growing Indian economy with power sector being considered as a major buyer. But electricity produced using imported LNG is not finding buyers due to cheaper alternatives including renewables, leading to stranding of significant capacity out of 25,000 MW of installed gas based power plants.