Foreign shareholders of the Russian Arctic LNG-2 project – French TotalEnergies, Chinese CNPC and CNOOC and a consortium of Japanese Mitsui and JOGMEC – announced force majeure, that is, the freezing of participation in the project.
As Ukrinform reports, The Bell writes about this.
Foreign shareholders, who together own 40% of the project, declared force majeure under their contracts, following an announcement last week by Russia's Novatek (which owns the rest of the project). This was done after sanctions imposed in the United States.
In fact, foreign partners have abandoned their financing responsibilities; accordingly, Novatek may be forced to finance the project on its own. This makes it more difficult for Arctic LNG 2 to market, finance and deliver gas and could result in Arctic LNG 2 losing long-term LNG export contracts. In addition, Arctic LNG-2 will be forced to sell gas on the spot market.
At the same time, the question of the availability of ice-class tankers for the export of LNG for this project also arises critically in Russia. The Zvezda shipyard is delaying tanker deliveries due to problems with equipment.
As Ukrinform reported, the start of deliveries of liquefied natural gas from Russia's new Arctic LNG 2 project will be delayed as the company declared force majeure on deliveries due to US sanctions. After this, the largest Chinese state-owned oil corporations CNPC and CNOOC appealed to the US government with a request to exempt them from sanctions. The American department did not provide a response.