Royal Dutch/Shell Group, Eur-ope's top energy company, and joint venture partner Asia Cement Corp (亞泥) are bidding to supply Taiwan with liquefied natural gas and build a LNG receiving and storage terminal.
TaLNG Co (大林), a company owned equally by Shell Gas BV and Asia Cement, submitted a bid to supply 1.7 million tonnes a year of natural gas to state-utility Taiwan Power Co (Taipower, 台電) for 25 years starting in 2008, Shell said in a statement.
The bid includes building a LNG receiving and storage terminal in Taoyuan in northern Taiwan, said Herman Wang, deputy finance manager at Asia Cement. TaLNG will source the natural gas from fields offshore Russia's Sakhalin Island, Shell said.
"LNG demand is expected to more than double by 2010," Peter de Wit, Shell Gas & Power's Asia Pacific regional business director, said in the statement.
Taipower, which received four bids, will announce a shortlist of bidders today, said Lee Chun-lai (
The TaLNG bid is valued at as much as NT$400 billion (US$11.5 billion), Wang said. That includes estimated LNG sales and an investment of about NT$20 billion to construct the LNG terminal, said Wang, confirming a local newspaper earlier today. The terminal's capacity may later be expanded to 6 million tonnes, the report said.
Asia Cement, Taiwan's second-largest cement maker, plans to diversify into the energy business, said Wang. The company scrapped an earlier plan to team up with Total Fina Elf SA to supply LNG to the Tatan project, he said. The Tatan project is a proposed 4,000-megawatt thermal power plant that would be built in Kuanyin township, Taoyuan County.
Last month, Taipower said it may select by as early as May the contractor to supply NT$80 billion (US$2.3 billion) of equipment and services for its planned Tatan thermal power plant. General Electric Co, Alstom SA and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd submitted bids.
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