Royal Dutch Shell will completely repay the second tranche of its $2b EDCO liquefaction plant loan by December 2017. The loan was granted to British Gas (BG) to establish the EDCO plant, reported Al Borsa. In February 2016, Shell took over BG’s assets in Egypt, including the EDCO plant, for $53b.

A source with the Egyptian Ministry of Petroleum and Mineral Resources stated that Shell had paid the first tranche of the loan in 2016, upon the intervention of the Egyptian General Petroleum Corporation (EGPC) after EDCO halted production in 2012. Accordingly, EPGC paid around $480m towards the loan installments.

The plant incurs around $200m in annual installment to payback the $2b loan. Thus, it needs to export around 22 cargos of liquefied natural gas (LNG) each year in order to reach balance between profit and cost. Therefore, the Egyptian government had allowed the plant to gradually export around 200mcf/d of LNG since September 2016 to prepare EDCO to run with full capacity by 2020. This will enable Shell to export one cargo of LNG to global markets every 20 days through the EDCO plant after it was not operating for two years.