"Negotiations are underway to purchase a 15% stake in the Gladstone LNG project," a company spokesman said. In August, a Kogas official said the company was seeking a 10% stake in the project.
Kogas is also in talks to buy a 9.8% stake in Indonesia's Donggi Senoro LNG project in Central Sulawesi and 15% in its LNG processing plant. The talks are underway with Japan's Mitsubishi Corporation, which holds a 51% stake in the DS LNG joint venture. The other partners in DS LNG are Indonesia's state oil company Pertamina (29%) and privately owned Indonesian energy player
Medco Energi Internasional(20%).
But Kogas refused to reveal the value of the deals. To fund its bids, Kogas sold Swiss franc-denominated bonds, worth CHF100 million ($103.5 million) last month. The gas firm made its first Swiss issue worth CHF200 million on September 10. Kogas plans to raise an additional $1 billion from dollar-denominated bonds. It has vowed to keep trying to diversify debt markets to finance acquisition bids.
Late last month, Kogas signed a deal to import 2.5 million mt (60,000 mt/month) of LNG from GDF Suez, a French-based energy company, from October 2010 to March 2014. The deals come at a time when South Korea's LNG consumption has increased due to strong demand for electricity on the back of the country's economic recovery.
Monthly sales of LNG by Kogas, which has a monopoly on domestic gas sales, have been growing on a year-on-year basis since August 2009, with the exception of last October. It sold 20.34 million mt of LNG in the first eight months this year, up 33.9% from the same period last year when it sold 15.19 million mt.
Meanwhile, Kogas' major natural gas development project in Uzbekistan's Surgil block has hit a snag as its South Korean partners, SK Gas and LG International are moving to leave the consortium, according a Kogas report submitted to parliament.
The Kogas-led South Korean consortium and state-run Uzbekneftegaz, which have formed a 50:50 joint venture for the $3 billion Surgil project, agreed last May to invest an additional $5 million each. But Kogas' partners have refused to do so, the report said.
Kogas has a 17.5% stake in the venture, and Honam Petrochemical has 17.5%. SK Gas, an affiliate of the country's top oil refiner SK Energy, STX Energy and LG International control 5% each.
In February, South Korean President Lee Myung-Bak and his Uzbek counterpart Islam Karimova agreed to speed up the Surgil joint venture project and signed a bilateral investment treaty, or BIT, on the project.
In the parliament report, Kogas also said it would come up with a roadmap for importing 10 billion cubic meters of natural gas annually for 30 years beginning 2017 from Russia's gas giant Gazprom. The two companies signed the $90 billion deal in September 2008.
Kogas will build a plant to liquefy natural gas in Vladivostok to be shipped in the form of LNG to South Korea's eastern port of Samcheok, where Kogas is building an LNG terminal. Kogas aims to complete building the infrastructure by 2015.
China Chemical Weekly: http://news.chemnet.com/en/detail-1411716.html
