Hydrogen company Tree Energy Solutions (TES), backed by Belgian investor group AtlasInvest, said on Wednesday it would build an LNG terminal in the German North Sea port town of Wilhelmshaven, business newspaper Handelsblatt reported on Wednesday.
The terminal is down to receive investments of 25 billion euros by 2045 and scheduled to go into operation in three years, Handelsblatt added, and could bring up to 30 billion cubic meters of natural gas to Germany in the first few years.
"Our Wilhelmshaven project will account for 10% of the total annual primary energy demand of Germany by 2045, approximately the annual energy consumption of 43 million households," TES Chief Operational Officer Otto Waterlander told Reuters in a statement.
In 2021, Germany consumed about 100 billion cubic meters of natural gas and 38% of that came from Russia.
"The German government has asked us to integrate an LNG terminal into our planned hydrogen factory in order to reduce our dependence on imports from Russia as quickly as possible," Waterlander told Handelsblatt.
"Technically, it makes no difference for us. We can use the same terminal to land LNG from natural gas as for green gas from hydrogen," Waterlander told the newspaper, adding the terminal would continue to be used exclusively for green gas in the long term.
(Writing by Paul Carrel and Zuzanna Szymanska)