Esa Hallivuori SVP of transmission business at state natural gas supplier Gasgrid said: “Everything has now been finalized and tested,” Yle says on its English-language page.
“This means that the customers of our terminal can begin to distribute gas to meet the needs of industry, energy production and households not just in Finland but also in the Baltic states,” he went on.
LNG is brought via Floating Storage Regassification Unit (FSRU), a large container vessel fitted out for the purpose, and piped on to land via a ship-to-shore connection.
LNG is then re-gassified for transmission to the national grid, while natural gas can be imported into Estonia from Finland, via the submarine Balticconnector pipeline, opened over three years ago.
Hallivuori added that the LNG terminal is fully functioning; the FSRU in question, the 291-m long Exemplar (pictured), has the capacity of around 68,000 tonnes of LNG, equating to more than one GW of energy.
The Inkoo terminal has an annual regasification capacity of 40TWh, far in excess of Finland’s annual consumption needs, Yle reports.
Estonia’s annual natural gas consumption is around 5TWh.
The LNG now at Inkoo is U.S. supplied; the Exemplar arrived off the Finnish coast late last year.
The invasion of Ukraine was followed by a drive to decouple from natural gas supplies from Russia, both in Finland and in Estonia and beyond.
Gasgrid says the Inkoo terminal will allow Finland: “to permanently phase out its dependency on Russian gas.”
An LNG terminal constructed at Paldiski, Estonia, has been mired in politics and in-fighting involving two private sector firms, Alexela and Infortar, and the state-owned Elering.
Natural gas can also be obtained from a long-operating LNG terminal at Klaipeda, Lithuania.
