Cheniere to charter Gaslog LNG carrier for two years

US operator Cheniere has signed a two-year term charter agreement with New York-listed shipowner Gaslog for the 145,000m³ Methane Jane Elizabeth.

The steam turbine carrier finished a term charter with trading firm Trafigura in the fourth quarter of last year and has remained on the spot charter market until this quarter, although it loaded a cargo at Cheniere's Sabine Pass liquefaction project in late December. Cheniere also has options to extend the charter by up to two years.

Gaslog already has two larger two-stroke carriers under charter with Cheniere — the 174,000m³ Gaslog Georgetown and Gaslog Galveston — which started when South Korean shipbuilder Samsung Heavy Industries (SHI) delivered the vessels in November 2020 and January this year, respectively.

And Cheniere is set to pick up a further two newbuild carriers under term charter from Gaslog in June and August this year — the 180,000m³ Gaslog Wellington and Gaslog Winchester are also being built by SHI.

Gaslog subsidiary Gaslog Partners is seeking to secure employment for five carriers that are either already uncommitted, or set to finish term charters this year.

The carriers are made up of two steam turbine carriers — the 145,000m³ Methane Rita Andrea and Methane Heather Sally — and the 155,000m³ Gaslog Sydney tri-fuel diesel-electric (TFDE) vessel, which are already off-charter, as well as two more TFDE carriers that are set to finish charters with Shell later this year — the 155,000m³ Gaslog Seattle and the Solaris.

Gaslog Partners is seeking "longer-term employment" for the carriers, the firm noted. The five carriers is much higher than a year earlier, when the subsidiary had only one carrier out of charter — the 155,000m³ Gaslog Shanghai, which has since been chartered to trading firm Gunvor.

Gaslog already has a pool of four carriers that operate on the spot charter market — three TFDE vessels and a single steam turbine carrier — one fewer than a year earlier. The 154,000m³ Gaslog Chelsea has been chartered to trading firm Glencore, and the 155,000m³ Gaslog Singapore is also under charter as a floating storage and regasification unit for a planned import facility in Panama, while the same-sized Gaslog Saratoga has joined the spot carriers following the end of its charter with Shell last year.

By Samuel Good