With a price-tag of 74,4 billion NOK ( EUR 8 billion), the Snøhvit plant in Finnmark is by far the most expensive industrial project in Northern Norway ever. It is Europe’s first and the world’s northernmost export facility for liquefied natural gas (LNG). And it is the first petroleum facility in operation in the Barents Sea.
In 2006 Statoil Hydro said the value of the gas from the Snøhvit project was 400 billion NOK (EUR 43,5 billion) with an estimated production time of 30 years. Since then, the LNG-plant has faced huge extra investment costs and the price of StatoilHydro’s LNG-contracts has dropped by 50 percent, writes the Norwegian business daily Dagens Næringsliv on Saturday.
Another – still to be solved – problem for the LNG-plant is the production capacity. Since the opening, the plant has been operating with reduced capacity due to unsolved, and partly unknown technical problems.
- We are planning to produce at 80 percent in 2009, said StatoilHydro CEO Helge Lund according to Dagens Næringsliv.
Despite longer payback time for the project, Snøhvit is still considered to be a huge money-machine for StatoilHydro. If today’s LNG prices will be the same in the 30 years to come, Snøhvit will generate a total income of 280 billion NOK(EUR 30,4 billion). But, it is difficult to make such estimations because there are no exact world-marked prices for LNG. The price of a shipment of LNG is open for negotiations and LNG from Snøhvit can be shipped to anywhere in the world.
