COMPARISON OF LOW-TONNAGE LIQUEFIED NATURAL GAS AND PIPELINE GAS TRANSPORTATION EXPENSES
The production of liquefied natural gas (LNG) is one of the most promising areas of the gas industry, the development of which is linked to the future of energy markets in the near future. The relevance of this direction for the Russian market is the possibility of creating flexible logistics schemes for the supply of energy resources to sparsely populated areas and remote regions, where a pipeline is unprofitable and impractical in view of the relatively low demand for energy raw materials. Implementation of low-tonnage LNG as an export product will reduce the existing political risks during transportation to/through the territory of the countries bordering Russia. This article proposes a model of comparative evaluation of the cost of low-tonnage LNG and pipeline gas. A feature of the model is the ability to consider a different number of delivery directions, which allows assessing the effect of the flexibility of LNG process chains. The results showed that the price for LNG could be significantly lower than that for pipeline gas, provided that the transportation distance is more than 950 km, and the number of delivery directions is not less than 5. However, when considering gas supply projects for individual locations where only one point of consumption needs to be gasified, LNG is less attractive due to relatively high operation expenses.