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Papua New Guinea has allowed the Papua LNG project to proceed in accordance with the gas agreement reached with the previous administration, in April 2019. The country was seeking to renegotiate the terms of the contract with the project’s operator Total, after a new government took power in May 2019, promising better conditions for the state and the citizens of Papua New Guinea.

Even if Total refused to renegotiate the financial terms of the agreement, it pledged to develop a local content plan for the project, to allow third-party access to the project’s pipelines, to open future negotiation about a public participation in the pipelines and to consider the use of LNG tankers belonging to the Papua New Guinean state oil company, Kumul Petroleum.

The US$13bn Papua LNG project is a 5.4 Mt/year export project to the developing Elk and Antelope gas fields in the Papua New Guinea Gulf province. It consists of two 2.7 Mt/year trains that would be developed in synergy with the existing 6..9 Mt/year PNG LNG plant (two 3.45 Mt/year trains commissioned in 2014). The final investment decision (FID) is scheduled for late-2019 and new trains could be commissioned as early as 2023-2024. The project, developed by Total, ExxonMobil and Oil Search, is part of a US$13bn plan to double Papua New Guinea’s LNG exports. ExxonMobil and Oil Search are also taking part in the development of the P’nyang gas field under the same plan.

The Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment of Finland is considering allowing the National Nuclear Waste Management Fund (NNWMF) to invest in stocks, estimating that raising the risk level in the investment activities of the NNWMF would enable higher returns.

The Parliament of Iceland has approved the implementation of the EU’s Third Energy Package; the approval was required to come into effect in Iceland, in Norway and in Liechtenstein, the three non-European Union countries grouped in the European Economic Area (EEA).

The total capacity of solar district heating in Denmark has increased from around 964 MWth in 2017 to 1 GWth in 2018 (+47 MWth) and to more than 1.1 GWth in August 2019, as more than 130 MWth were commissioned during the first months of 2019. The average size of a Danish solar district heating plant is 9 MWth, or about 13,000 m².

According to the Socioeconomic Planning Secretary of the Philippines, energy demand in the Philippines could increase by an average 5.7%/year through 2040 under a high economic growth scenario, resulting in a four-fold increase in energy consumption. Indeed, energy consumption in the archipelago has been rising rapidly since 2010 by over 5%/year through 2017. …

The National Energy Administration (NEA) of China plans to raise gas production production capacity in the Sichuan Basin in south-western China, by developing capacities by 100 bcm/year. The required investment and the timeline for the expansion project were not disclosed. …

Japanese companies Tokyo Gas and Kyushu Electric Power have set a 50-50 joint venture (JV) called Chiba Sodegaura Power to develop a 2 GW gas turbine combined cycle power plant in Sodegaura, Chiba (Japan).

The World Bank has approved a US$185m financing for the development of 310 MW of renewable power generation capacity in Bangladesh. The US$185m credit also includes a US$26m loan and a US$2.9m grant from the Strategic Climate Fund (SCF) of the World Bank’s Climate Investment Funds (CIFs). ….