Friday 19 / April / 2024
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has come to an agreement with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) over energy supplies.
An agreement was made with UAE leaders in Abu Dhabi to buy liquified natural gas (LNG) from the Gulf state after Scholz and his delegation met with Emirati President Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, UAE state news agency WAM reported.
"I welcome the signing of the joint declaration" on the "energy security" agreement, WAM cited Scholz as saying.
The chancellor arrived in the UAE on Sunday after meeting with the Saudi crown prince on Saturday.
Earlier in the day, he emphasized the need to rely on a variety of sources for Germany's energy needs, saying that being dependent on just one source "will certainly not happen again."
Scholz is scheduled to stop off in Qatar to end his two-day trip to the region.
The German energy company RWE has signed a deal to secure a delivery of 137,000 cubic meters of LNG to be sent to the new LNG terminal in Brunsbüttel near Hamburg in December.
According to the dpa news agency, the amount included in the first delivery equates to around 0.95 billion kilowatt hours of electricity. The Nord Stream 1 pipeline from Russia to Germany on February 1 this year, before the invasion of Ukraine, delivered the equivalent 1.75 billion kilowatt hours of electricity in a day according to its operators.
The company also signed a memorandum regarding long-term deliveries from 2023.
"We need to make sure that the production of LNG in the world is advanced to the point where the high demand that exists can be met without having to resort to the production capacity that exists in Russia," the chancellor said before the deal was reached.
Scholz is being accompanied by a large delegation of German business leaders whose firms are particularly vulnerable to gas shortages this winter.
Germany is also on the lookout for sources of green hydrogen produced using renewable energies that it may hope to source from the Gulf.
