Putin has gas, way too much gas!
The Russian president's liquefied natural gas project seems to have taken a big blow from US sanctions.
Arctic LNG 2 will cost Vladimir Putin $21 billion (€19 million). In 2030, once peak extraction is reached, this megaproject will supposedly generate a fifth of the 100 million tons of LNG (liquefied natural gas) that Moscow was aiming to produce, according to the media outlet Korii. But because US sanctions have been lifted, gas exports seem to have come to a standstill. Indeed, since August, only three LNG tankers have transported LNG from northern Russia... to "nowhere". The ships are said to have returned to floating storage units in Russian waters. One of them is said to have transferred the gas to another ship, which in turn transported it to northeastern Egypt. Since then, both vessels have been completely immobile.
The Arctic LNG 2 project was taken over by Novatek, a Russian natural gas production company. To bring Putin’s ambitions to life, it had teamed up with Japanese and Chinese partners as well as TotalEnergies, which has been keeping its distance since US sanctions.
“Whatever interest buyers had before [the latest US sanctions], they have now disappeared,” says Kjell Eikland, CEO of Eikland Energy, a Norwegian consultancy specializing in the energy sector, reports Korii.
So what do we do with all this gas?
(MH with Manon Pierre - Source: Korii - Picture: Picture by tatarstan.ru via WikiCommons under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license)