The Croatia government on Thursday declared the planned construction of a liquefied natural gas – LNG – terminal on the island of Krk a “strategic investment project”.
Plans to build a LNG terminal on Krk, potentially important for supplying Croatia and Central Europe with gas, date back years. The government has since founded a company, LNG Croatia, responsible for organizing tenders for construction.
According to a law on the strategic investment project, all procedures regarding the project will be expedited and marked as a top priority.
The project is worth around a billion euro in total – the terminal itself around 600 million euro – and is marked as important for the country’s economic growth and development, and thereby for new employment.
Construction will start in mid-2016 and last three years.
Croatia uses around 2.7 billion cubic metres of gas a year and the terminal will therefore be in a position to supply EU and regional countries with gas as well, with a capacity of 4 to 6 billion cubic metres.
The LNG terminal on Krk has been classified a medium-term project in European energy security strategy, along with the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline, TAP, and its Croatian corridor, the Ionian-Adriatic Pipeline, IAP, to which the Krk terminal would potentially be linked.
The EU backed the project in October 2014, offering 4.9 million euro towards a feasibility study for the project. The EU called it important for “building an infrastructure needed for assuring the energetic security of Europe”.
Robin Dunningan, secretary for energetic policy in the US State Department, in December 2014 confirmed American interest in the project as well. She noted that it opened up the possibility of Croatia becoming a regional gas supply hub.
Dunningan added that the US wants TAP to go through Croatia and Bosnia, giving the region an alternative gas supply and so decreasing regional dependency on Russian gas.
In talks with Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic in February 2015, US Vice-President Joseph Biden proposed that gas from the LNG terminal on Krk could be used to supply Serbia through a pipeline running through Hungary.