November 25 (SeeNews) - Croatia, Austria and German federal state of Bavaria will jointly seek cooperation on models to build natural gas pipelines and expand the capacity of Croatia's existing liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal on the Adriatic island of Krk, Croatian prime minister Andrej Plenkovic said.
“Our wish, in the spirit of European solidarity and the changed circumstances (mostly due to the Russian aggression on Ukraine), is Croatia's gas and oil pipelines to be of service also for neighbouring countries. Therefore our initiative towards Slovenia, Hungary, Bosnia, Germany, and Austria represents a concretisation of different plans drafted by our experts,” Plenkovic said on Thursday during a visit to the LNG terminal together with Austrian chancellor Karl Nehammer and Bavarian minister-president Markus Soder, accordng to a government press release.
The LNG terminal on the Croatian northern Adriatic island of Krk started operating in January 2021. It delivers gas to the Croatian national transmission network, which is connected to fellow EU member states Slovenia, Italy and Hungary, as well as to non-EU members Serbia and Montenegro. The terminal has a regasification capacity of 338,000 cubic metres per hour, equal to 2.9 billion cubic metres per year. This spring, Croatia boosted the original capacity of the terminal by 12% to 2.9 billion cubic metres, in line with the EU's goal to reduce its energy dependence on Russia.
This summer Plenkovic announced plans to increase the capacity of the terminal up to 6.1 billion cubic metres per year. Following that, the terminal will be able to handle volumes twice bigger than Croatia's overall demand by households and companies, he said.
Nehammer and Soder pledged support to the expansion of the LNG terminal on Krk.
Both Austria and Bavaria are dependent on Russian gas imports.