Japan Petroleum Exploration (Japex) expects to increase its LNG imports in the fiscal year of April 2020 - March 2021 after starting up the Fukushima Natural Gas Power Plant at Soma in Fukushima prefecture. Japex owns a 33% stake in the 1.18 GW plant which entered commercial service on August 24. Other stakeholders are Mitsui (29%), Osaka Gas (20%), Hokkaido Electric Power Co. (9%), and Mitsubishi Gas Chemical (9%).
The new power plant also has a new 230,000-kilolitre LNG storage tank and two 75 tons/hour regasification units to generate electricity. Japex said the facility would require about 1 million tons/year of LNG to generate electricity at full capacity. Following the plant startup, Japex expects that in this fiscal year, it will need about 1.3 million tons of LNG equivalent of gas. It handled about 1.1 million tons of LNG equivalent of gas in the last fiscal year.
