Shell Opens India LNG Terminal on West Coast for Use by Gujarat Petroleum

Royal Dutch Shell Plc opened its Hazira liquefied natural gas terminal on India’s west coast to Gujarat State Petroleum Corp., the first time it’s allowing a third party to use the terminal, an official said.

The Iberica Knutsen, a 135,230 cubic-meter tanker, reached Hazira yesterday with a cargo from Trinidad & Tobago, according to transmissions from ships captured by AISLive on Bloomberg.

Shell will allow Gujarat State Petroleum to import a “few cargoes,” Deepak Mukarji, a Shell spokesman, said by mobile phone today, without giving details on the duration of the agreement.

Europe’s biggest oil company supplies LNG to buyers in India through the Hazira terminal. Shell owns 74 percent of Hazira LNG Pvt. and Total SA the rest.

The terminal has a capacity to receive 3.6 million metric tons of LNG a year, Nitin Shukla, managing director of Hazira LNG, said in September. The capacity can be expanded to 5 million tons a year, according to Hazira LNG’s website.

To contact the reporter on this story: Dinakar Sethuraman in Singapore at dinakar@bloomberg.net

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