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A vessel for transporting liquefied natural gas has docked at a facility in northern Russia, in what appears to be one of the first attempts to circumvent sanctions imposed on the project.
The US last year added Russia’s Arctic LNG 2 to its sanctions list in response to Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Led by private energy company Novatek, the project started production in December but has so far been unable to ship any LNG due to sanctions hampering its efforts to secure vessels needed to transport the super-chilled fuel.
But satellite imagery shows a vessel roughly 280 metres long — about the length of a typical LNG carrier — docked at the Arctic LNG 2 on August 1. The image also shows flaring at the facility, pointing towards a renewed activity at the site.
“The vessel is an LNG carrier, and the flaring indicates a restarting of activities” at Arctic LNG 2, said Mehdy Touil, an LNG lead specialist at Calypso Commodities, a software company specialising in the LNG industry.
Novatek has not responded to a request for comment.
The development was first reported by trade publication gCaptain.
LNG has grown in importance for Russia’s wartime economy, providing valuable income after the loss of pipeline exports to Europe following its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Arctic LNG 2 was supposed to be the one of the flagship export projects for the country, in addition to Yamal LNG, which is not subject to sanctions and still sends a lot of its volumes to Europe.
The EU and Asia have not imposed direct sanctions on the imports of Russian LNG, but Brussels in June approved restrictions that will forbid the unloading of Russian LNG from large icebreaking ships on to smaller vessels at EU ports, significantly limiting Russia’s options for distributing its gas globally.
In anticipation of further tightening of restrictions to its LNG business, Moscow is suspected of assembling a “dark fleet” of LNG carriers through mysterious buyers in the UAE, akin to how it built up its dark fleet for oil tankers.
While the identity of the vessel was unclear from the satellite imagery, the ship in the photograph is the same length as the Pioneer, a Palau-flagged LNG tanker, which was bought by its current owner in April.
The Pioneer is part of Russia’s suspected dark fleet of LNG carriers.
Positional data transmitted by the Pioneer’s crew states that the vessel made its way to the sea north of Norway, where it has been sailing in circles since late July. Radar imagery taken by a European Space Agency’s Sentinel-1 satellite, however, does not show any vessels at the isolated locations where the Pioneer has claimed to be.
The ship’s managers, Ocean Speedstar Solutions, have not immediately responded to a request for comment. The ship’s owner, Zara Shipholding, owns no other vessels and refers all correspondence to Ocean Speedstar.