Linde To Purchase Helium From Gazprom’s Amur Plant

The Linde Group has signed a sale and purchase agreement with Gazprom Export LLC, for the offtake of helium from Gazprom’s new Amur helium plant.

Gazprom Export LLC is a 100 percent subsidiary of OAO Gazprom.

The plant is currently under construction in the far east of Russia, as part of the development of Gazprom’s Power of Siberia gas project.

Pursuant to the agreement, Linde will become a purchaser of significant volumes of helium from the new production facility in the town of Svobodny. The plant is due to be commissioned in parallel with the start of the flow of natural gas extracted from the Chayandinskoye field along the new gas transportation route “Yakutia — Khabarovsk — Vladivostok”.

Linde’s Engineering Division is the licenser for the cryogenic gas separation technology at the Amur gas processing plant in Svobodny and will engineer and supply units for ethane and natural gas liquids (NGL) extraction and nitrogen rejection, as well as for helium purification, liquefaction and storage. The project represents a unique logistics undertaking with the plant being located some 1,500 km from the ports of export in and around Vladivostok.

The Chayandinskoye field, together with other resources owned by Gazprom in the East Siberian region, forms one of the largest reservoirs of helium in the world. The Amur helium plant will become a significant new source of helium when it is fully operational that will help to meet the growing global demand for decades.

Helium is used in a wide range of applications, including the manufacture and operation of MRI (Magnet Resonance Imaging) scanners as well as the manufacture of semiconductors, LCD screens and fibre optic cable. As it can only be economically produced from helium-rich natural gas sources, there are only a limited number of helium production facilities around the world.

“Linde is very proud to have entered this long-term agreement with Gazprom Export to purchase significant volumes of helium produced from this major project, and we look forward to the first supplies of helium targeted for 2021,” said Sanjiv Lamba, member of the executive board of Linde AG.