The deals follow trips to the Middle East by economics and energy minister Robert Habeck, accompanied by a delegation of business leaders, as well as a visit by chancellor Olaf Scholz to the UAE. The chancellor also visited Saudi Arabia without a supply deal being sealed.

Habeck described the Qatar visit as the start of a long-term energy partnership agreed in principle last spring, adding that the unidentified companies, which media reports said included utility companies but not the freshly nationalized Uniper, “will now enter concrete contract negotiations with the Qatari side.”

Earlier this year, Berlin’s talks with Qatari leaders reportedly hit a snag because the German side was hesitant to commit to deals for at least 20 years and also wanted prices linked to Dutch benchmark gas prices, rather than oil.

The arrangements with Qatar will have more of a long-term character. The planned $30 billion expansion of the country’s North Field, believed to harbor the world’s largest natural gas reserves, is not expected to be completed before 2026, though initial supplies could be landed in Germany as early as 2024.

Qatar aims to nearly double its production of LNG by 2025, with the help of the world’s petrochemical majors, including Total, Shell, ExxonMobil, Eni and ConocoPhillips.

Alongside gas supply, Germany and the emirate of Qatar have agreed other cooperation projects. Following Scholz’s visit, Essen-based energy group RWE signed a Letter of Intent with the emirate’s state-owned Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) covering the supply of 137,000 cbm of LNG.

The first volumes are due to arrive at the end of this year and are planned to be used in the commissioning of Germany’s first LNG terminal at Brunsbüttel. Additional shipments could arrive starting in 2023.

ADNOC has also entered a number of agreements with German firms, including energy supplier STEAG and Arubis, formerly Norddeutsche Affinerie, Europe’s largest copper producer in and the largest copper recycler worldwide.

The deals cover cargoes of low-carbon ammonia, a carrier fuel for hydrogen that can play a critical role in decarbonizing hard-to-abate industry sectors.  The first shipments arrived in Hamburg earlier in September.

A proposed Energy Security and Industry Accelerator (ESIA) agreement between Germany and the UAE would cover energy security, decarbonization and climate action. Projects could include exploring further opportunities to accelerate growth and collaboration across the hydrogen value chain.

Germany ambitiously plans to replace all Russian energy imports, in particular natural gas, by mid-2024. In 2021, Russia accounted for 55% of the country’s natural gas imports. The share shrank to 26% by the end of the 2022 first half, due to cuts in the output of the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, initially to 20% of capacity.

More recently, gas flow dwindled to nothing as the Kremlin shut the valves. Russia was thought to be flaring off surplus gas that might have gone into the pipeline.

The planned second pipeline, Nord Strom 2 did not come on stream as scheduled, due to European sanctions against Russia following the invasion of Ukraine.

Along with the LNG deals, another stop-gap measure to improve German and European energy supply this winter could encompass longer operating times for the country’s nuclear power plants that were due to be taken offline at the end of this year.

Due to the deepening energy crisis, Habeck — a member of the Green party, which opposes nuclear energy — is expected to do an about-face on this issue as the party did earlier on the continued use of coal. Germany’s chemical producers have repeatedly advocated for the prolonged use of nuclear power.

Germany imported about 56 billion cbm of natural gas from Russia in 2020, amounting to nearly 55% of its gas imports. About 40% of the country’s demand for gas comes from industry.

The EU’s total gas imports from Russia are pegged at about 168b billion cbm. The bloc has said it aims to reduce gas imports from Russia by nearly two-thirds by the end of 2022, and to become independent of all Russian fossil fuels well before 2030.

Author: Dede Williams, Freelance Journalist