Renergen signs LNG supply agreement with Consol Glass

South Africa’s Renergen revealed last week that it had agreed to supply LNG to Consol Glass, a Johannesburg-based supplier of glass packaging materials.

In a statement, Renergen said it had signed a five-year agreement with Consol Glass. Under that document, the former company will begin deliveries to the latter in January 2022, shortly after the commissioning of the first phase of its Victoria gas project.

Renergen has not yet revealed the value of the deal. It did report, however, that it was slated to supply LNG to Consol Glass at the rate of about 14 tonnes per day, equivalent to 5,110 tonnes per year (tpy). Delivery volumes will be lower initially, owing to the need for equipment testing, but will ramp up to the contracted level of 14 tonnes per day over a period of three months, it explained.

The company noted that the deal with Consol Glass would be its first supply agreement that did not involve providing LNG for use as a vehicle fuel. Renergen’s first major customer was a subsidiary of TotalEnergies (France), which aims to use LNG from the Victoria project as fuel for long-haul trucks. The French major will use its branded filling stations along the Johannesburg-Durban section of the N3 highway to distribute LNG from the first phase of Renergen’s plant.

The South African firm has said that it intends to launch the first phase of the Victoria gas project before the end of this year. It will be extracting natural gas from fields near Welkom, Virginia and Theunissen in Free State and using this gas as feedstock for an LNG plant that is still under construction. Once the facility comes online, it will halt production of CNG and switch to LNG.

The company hopes to bring the second stage of its gas liquefaction plant on stream in 2023. The facility will include a helium unit, as the Victoria fields contain unusually high volumes of helium. Sproule, an international energy consulting firm, estimates that these sites may hold as much as 9.74bn cubic metres of helium, or more than the total proven reserves of North America.