Asia continues long-term LNG supply quest

South Korean utility is the latest to sign up for contractual volumes as the continent’s purchasers appear to put a greater premium on supply security than Europeans

TotalEnergies and Korea’s Hanwha Energy have signed an SPA that will see the French major supply the utility with 600,000t/yr of LNG for 15 years from 2024. The deal takes the volumes of new term supply to which Asian buyers have agreed in the three months since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine disrupted the global gas market to almost 11.3mn t/yr, by Petroleum Economist calculations (see Fig.1). In sharp contrast, European utilities have inked deals for only half that amount in the same period. And it is only two companies—France’s Engie and Poland’s Pgnig—that have been responsible for securing that European supply. Hanwha is the seventh different Asian buyer to sign a term contract, joining f