November 19, 2024 [Oil Price]- France is importing record volumes of Russian LNG even as overall LNG purchases are falling, ship-tracking data compiled by Bloomberg showed on Monday, highlighting Europe’s growing imports of Russian LNG.

So far this year, France has already imported more LNG from Russia’s Yamal export plant than in any other full year since these deliveries began six years ago, per the data collated by Bloomberg.

Shipments into the French terminal of Dunkirk have surged in particular, also helped by deliveries of German state firm Securing Energy for Europe GmbH (SEFE), the former Gazprom unit in Germany, which the German government nationalized in 2022 after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

SEFE has a contract to deliver LNG cargoes from Yamal into Dunkirk inherited by the former owner, Gazprom.

The German state company is buying the Russian LNG cargoes and the contract “is therefore being fulfilled in order to keep the advantage for the Russian side as low as possible,” a spokesperson for Germany’s economy ministry told Bloomberg.

SEFE has never delivered or attempted to deliver Russian LNG into Germany, company spokesman Jan-Peter Haack told Bloomberg in an email.

Last week, reports emerged that Germany’s economy ministry had warned the operators of its LNG import terminals to refuse acceptance of cargoes from Russia until further notice, as the import of Russian LNG undermines the very concept of rushing to set up LNG ports in the first place—cutting off dependence on Russian gas supply.

The German economy ministry has sent a letter to Deutsche Energy Terminal, advising it “not to accept any deliveries of Russian LNG,” the Financial Times reported last week, quoting the letter it had seen. The ministry was informed by Deutsche Energy Terminal that the LNG import facility was scheduled to receive a cargo of LNG from Russia.

Russian LNG accounted for 20% of the EU’s liquefied natural gas imports in the first nine months of 2024, compared to 14% for the same period last year, amid markedly lower EU imports of the super-chilled fuel, a report by the EU Agency for the Cooperation of Energy Regulators (ACER) showed last month.