According to the European Commission’s latest gas market report, the EU member states paid around 16.2 million euros for the 108 billion cubic meters of liquefied natural gas they imported last year. Specifically, EU managed to import the highest volume of LNG for 2019.
In fact, last year’s LNG imports marked a record of 48 billion cubic meters, up by 75% in comparison to 2018, as they were mainly boosted due to the lower prices and weaker demand in Asia.
For the records, this is the highest LNG import volume ever recorded, representing 27% in the total EU natural gas imports, while surpassed the previous record of 2011 by more than 30%.
Moreover, the LNG import bill of the full year of 2019 was slightly increased from 15.4 billion from 2018 as average prices dropped.
As EU further reported, Spain was the biggest LNG importer with 22.4 billion cubic mettres. Following there was France with 22.1 billion cubic metres and the UK with 18 billion cubic metres.
At the same time, Italy imported 13.5 billion cubic metres of LNG and Netherlands and Belgium imported about 8.6-8.8 billion cubic metres of the chilled fuel.
Concluding, as for the supplier side, responsible for the 28% of the EU total LNG imports was Qatari LNG, followed by Russia with 20% and the US with 16%.
