The year 2020 will see a "wave" of domestic and foreign investors interested in the gas and electricity sector in Vietnam, especially after the Ministry of Government announced a decision on strategic direction for Vietnam's energy sector development in next decade, with a vision to 2045, in February. This resolution limits the growth of coal-fired thermal power and focuses on rapid development of LNG gas thermal power plants and gas import and distribution infrastructure.

The size of the proposed projects as well as the number and diversity of investors are assessed as unprecedented in the history of Vietnam's electricity industry.

The excitement of this sector comes largely from well-communicated projects and associated with investors and fuel imported from the US as well as leading energy corporations of Japan, South Korea and some Vietnamese private enterprise. Only 9 projects have been approved for addition to the current power plan. Among these, there are 5 projects that have an investor and can proceed to negotiate a power purchase agreement (PPA) with EVN while many large projects, such as LNG Long Son, LNG Ca Na, LNG Long An and LNG Quang Ninh have not announced the official investor.

However, IEEFA argues that developing gas power projects is not an easy process. In fact, some investors have set ambitious goals by themselves on the completion of project implementation stages, despite the complexity of the LNG gas thermal power project in general capital consists of many phases with always volatile components and risks in input-output stages, counterparty risks, construction risks and etc.

 “Gas-fired thermal power projects will face more difficulty when implementing than coal-power projects, which have been chronically behind schedule,” said the author of the IEEFA report.

Furthermore, although information on LNG gas thermal power projects in Vietnam has given the impression that most of these projects easily pass the licensing process at the competent state agencies, the above the real situation is much more complicated.

Currently, Vietnam's legal changes are leading to the application of popular project models, such as build-operate-transfer (BOT) and independent power plant (IPP) to the LNG power sector  is no longer easy.