On Thursday and Friday, the President will visit Lithuanian capital and LNG terminal in Klaipeda.
President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović will arrive on Thursday in a two-day official visit to Lithuania, where she will meet with President Dalia Grybauskaite and other senior officials and visit a floating terminal for liquefied natural gas (LNG) in the port of Klaipeda on the Baltic sea, announced the President’s Office on Tuesday, reports Jutarnji List on July 19, 2016.
On Thursday, the first day of her visit, presidents Grabar-Kitarović and Grybauskaite will meet in Vilnius together with their official delegations. The President will then attend the opening ceremony for the Croatian Embassy in Vilnius and meet separately with Lithuanian Prime Minister Algirdas Butkevicius and Speaker of Parliament Loreta Grauziniene. In Vilnius, the President will also lay a wreath at the tomb of those killed in the fight for independence of Lithuania.
On the second day of her visit, accompanied by Lithuanian Energy Minister Rokas Masiulis, the President will visit the LNG terminal in the port of Klaipeda and meet with Croatian crew members working on the terminal.
From the very beginning of her term of office, the President has emphasized the importance of energy independence and of the diversification of supply routes. The two presidents have already discussed this issue in June last year, during President Grybauskaite’s official visit to Zagreb. President Grabar-Kitarović believes that Croatia has a lot to learn from Lithuania, which has gained full energy independence in eight years. One of the important projects in this regard was the floating terminal for liquefied natural gas, which has been situated since October 2014 in the Baltic port of Klaipeda, and bears the symbolic name “Independence”. Croatian citizens represented as many as 30 percent of people who worked on the construction of the terminal.
A year ago in Zagreb, President Grybauskaite explained that eight years earlier her country was one hundred percent dependent on Russian gas and oil, and that now, as far as gas is concerned, it was completely independent and would soon be independent in the production of electricity as well.
Croatian government on 8 June adopted a conclusion on the acceleration of the preparation and implementation of the first phase of the LNG terminal project on the island of Krk, which would include a floating terminal for storage and regasification of liquefied natural gas. The LNG terminal on Krk is considered a strategic project for the country and an important factor in the diversification of natural gas supply, not only for Croatia but also for other countries of South Eastern Europe, and has been included in the Strategy of Storage of Liquefied Natural Gas, which was published by the European Commission in February.
