Ninety-Five Percent of the Gas Portugal Burned Last Year Came Ashore at Sines, on 46 Ships, Three of Them Russian

Portugal does not produce natural gas. Every cubic metre it burns arrives by one of two routes, and a report the Entidade Reguladora dos Serviços Energéticos (ERSE, the Energy Services Regulatory Authority) published on Friday puts a number on how lopsided the split has become. In 2025, about 95 percent of the gas that entered the country came ashore at a single place: the liquefied natural gas terminal at Sines. The remaining 5 percent arrived by pipeline, through the two interconnections with the Spanish grid at Campo Maior and Valença do Minho.

The report is the regulator's annual assessment of technical quality of service across the gas sector, approved on 1 September 2026 and covering calendar year 2025. It is a dry document about interruptions, filling times and network kilometres. It also happens to contain the clearest public accounting of where Portugal's gas comes from, and it lands in a year when the answer to that question has become a political one.

Forty-six ships, and where they sailed from

Sines took 46 discharges from methane tankers in 2025, seven fewer than in 2024, a fall of 13.2 percent. The energy landed came to roughly 47.7 terawatt-hours, down 1.5 percent on the year, of which the terminal sent about 44.6 terawatt-hours into the national transport grid. Total volume discharged was 7,083,533 cubic metres of LNG, handled by a workforce that stopped work for three days in August over a shift grievance dating to 2012.

The origins matter more than the totals. Nigeria was the single largest source, accounting for 50 percent of discharge operations. The United States came next at 43 percent. The remaining 7 percent came from Russia.

Seven percent of 46 discharges is three ships, which is what the Lusa news agency reported on Friday, adding that this matched the 2024 count and that the energy landed from Russian cargoes was likewise unchanged at 3.3 terawatt-hours. Portugal intends to end Russian LNG imports by the start of 2027, under the European rules progressively eliminating gas purchases from Russia. The environment and energy minister, Maria da Graça Carvalho, said in February that a single company holds a long-term contract to bring Russian gas in through Sines: the Spanish utility Naturgy.

That is the whole of the exposure, and it is worth being precise about its size. Three ships out of 46 is not a dependency in the sense the phrase usually carries. But it is not zero either, and the deadline for making it zero is now fifteen months away.

What the blackout did to a Nigerian tanker

Buried in the terminal's performance figures is a small forensic detail about 28 April 2025. The average effective discharge time for a methane tanker in 2025 was 20 hours 39 minutes, up 0.3 percent on 2024. Most discharges clustered between 18 and 26 hours, landing between 0.90 and 1.16 terawatt-hours each.

One did not. A ship from Nigeria took more than 34 hours to discharge a cargo comparable in size to the rest. ERSE attributes the delay directly to the Iberian blackout of 28 April 2025, which knocked out the auxiliary systems supporting continuous operation at the terminal and added roughly 11 hours to the job. It is a modest entry in a technical annex, and one of the more concrete measurements anyone has published of what that afternoon cost a single piece of Portuguese infrastructure.

Elsewhere the terminal's numbers moved the right way. The average tanker discharge delay fell 8.4 percent against 2024. On the road side, Sines filled 7,546 LNG tanker trucks over the year, 214 more than in 2024 and a rise of 2.9 percent, carrying about 2.2 terawatt-hours out to the autonomous gas units that serve isolated local networks. Fourteen percent of those fillings took longer than two hours, unchanged from the previous year, with the regulator blaming unavailable filling bays, the need to cool tanks, and operational unavailability.

The pipes behind the terminal

What Sines feeds is a transport network of 1,375 kilometres of high-pressure pipe, between 20 and 85 bar, run by REN Gasodutos, with 206 stations along it. Gas is also stored underground in salt cavities at Carriço, in the municipality of Pombal, operated by REN Armazenagem. Beyond the transport grid sit 11 distribution networks totalling 22,044 kilometres, up 1.85 percent on the year.

Those networks served 1,567,872 delivery points at the end of December 2025, down 0.04 percent on 2024. Lisboagás is the largest operator by connections, at 524,017, ahead of REN Portgás on 410,521, Lusitaniagás on 245,339 and Setgás on 175,687. Lisboagás is also the operator that shed the most connections over the year, down 0.86 percent.

ERSE is also the body that sets what households pay: it pencilled a 6.4 percent lift to the regulated natural gas tariff from 1 October. On reliability, 2025 was a better year. About 0.7 percent of customer installations saw their gas cut at some point, and around 75 percent of the interruptions recorded were classed as unplanned and caused by chance or force majeure. In absolute terms, 10,861 customers were interrupted across the whole country. Three operators, Dianagás, Duriensegás and Sonorgás, recorded no interruptions at all. Medigás and Paxgás got worse; Beiragás, Lusitaniagás, REN Portgás and Tagusgás got better; Setgás held steady. For the sixth consecutive year the transport network recorded no interruptions at its exit points.

One operator missed a standard. Every distributor met the general benchmark for average duration of interruptions. On the separate benchmark for average number of interruptions per 1,000 customers, which applies only to Lisboagás, the Lisbon operator failed, and ERSE lists three reasons: a heavy programme of scheduled works tied to building refurbishment, the periodic low-pressure leak-detection campaign, and the ongoing conversion of the Lisboagás network from 22 millibars to pressures of up to 4 bar.

What this means for foreign residents

• If your building runs on piped gas in Lisbon, the interruptions are deliberate: Lisboagás is the one operator that missed its interruption-frequency standard, and the reason is a conversion programme raising network pressure plus systematic leak-hunting. Planned outages in Lisbon buildings are a feature of that work, not a sign of a failing network.
• A single point of failure, by design: 95 percent of the country's gas enters through one terminal on the Alentejo coast. The pipeline links to Spain carry the rest. That concentration is the standing backdrop to any conversation about Portuguese energy security.
• The Russian share is small and dated to end: three cargoes out of 46, held under one Spanish company's long-term contract, and due to stop by early 2027 under EU rules. If you see the figure quoted as a large dependency, it is not.
• Gas is also a climate line item: gas-fired power is the single biggest reason Portugal's greenhouse gas emissions rose 1.6 percent last year while the EU's fell. The terminal at the top of this article is the front end of that.
• Botija gas is a separate system: the bottled gas most rural households use does not travel through these networks. Nothing in this report speaks to bottled prices or supply.
• The blackout is still being costed: 28 April 2025 keeps surfacing in regulatory paperwork more than a year later. Here it is 11 hours of delay to one tanker. Expect more of these line items as annual reports for 2025 continue to land.

The report does not editorialise, and it does not need to. The picture it draws is of a system that worked better in 2025 than in 2024, on almost every measure the regulator tracks, while remaining about as concentrated as a national gas supply can be. Whether that concentration is a vulnerability or simply the shape of a small country's energy geography is a judgement ERSE leaves to others. What it has done is put the arithmetic on the record: one terminal, 46 ships, three of them Russian, and fifteen months to make that last number zero.