Lights Are Out at Russia's Giant LNG Construction Facility Due to Impact of Energy Sanctions - BNN Bloomberg

(Bloomberg) — Activity at Russia’s only construction site producing liquefied natural gas modules appears to be stagnating; It’s another sign of how Western sanctions are hindering the country’s bid to become a top player in this key energy market.

Novatek PJSC’s Belokamenka facility in the Barents Sea, dubbed the “plant producing LNG facilities”, appears to have been largely shelved. Nighttime light intensity at the facility in late October and early November was at its lowest level since 2019, according to satellite observations compiled and analyzed by the Earth Observation Group at the Payne Institute for Public Policy in Colorado.

The facility is intended to become a unique hub for the local assembly of modular processing plants capable of supercooling natural gas into its liquid form, so-called LNG trains. But after building two trains for Russia’s newest export facility, Arctic LNG 2, there is no sign of activity needed to further increase capacity in the near future.

This is due to US and European efforts to restrict Moscow’s energy revenue after its invasion of Ukraine. Western powers imposed sanctions on Novatek and all future LNG projects, including production facilities, transshipment facilities and tankers.

Dr. D., an EOG researcher with many years of experience in scientific programming for remote control. “The average brightness of electric lights at the plant decreased by 75% from 2021 to 2023,” said Mikhail Zhizhin, pointing to a sharp decline in industrial activity in Belokamenka. Perception of the night side of the world.

Novatek did not respond to Bloomberg’s request for comment on the current level of activity at Belokamenka.

Rather than building LNG production facilities from scratch in the harsh Arctic climate, Novatek came up with the idea of assembling them in milder conditions near the port of Murmansk. The shipyard in Belokamenka built the first two trains for Arctic LNG 2, each consisting of 14 modules mounted on a massive, gravity-based floating platform. Once completed, one in July 2023 and the other this year, it was towed some 1,500 nautical miles along the Northern Sea Route by a small fleet of tugboats and docked at the Gydan peninsula, a journey that took around three weeks.

These trains were successfully installed at Arctic LNG 2 and were producing LNG until the first half of October, when Western sanctions made both shipping and cargo sales difficult and largely closed the plant. Satellite images show that a third, partially constructed train remains at Belokamenka. Russia’s RBC newspaper reported in August that Novatek plans to cease operations at Belokamenka from 2025 to early 2026.

Satellites have been monitoring nighttime surface lights around the world since the 1970s, and the data is well established as a proxy for activities on the ground. It has been used to predict industrial developments, population movements or economies of regions and countries. The technique provides sufficient detailed data to evaluate the performance of individual facilities, such as sawmills in British Columbia.

According to data from the Payne Institute, light intensity at Novatek’s construction site was highest from 2022 to 2023, which coincided with the period when the plant was building two trains for Arctic LNG 2. The subsequent dimming of the lights at Belokamenka signals a pause in construction at the site and a setback in Russia’s bid to capture 20% of the global LNG market within the next decade.

“Future Russian LNG projects are also set to use the Belokamenka construction center for pre-assembly of modules,” said Laura Page, natural gas and LNG analyst at research firm Kpler. The lack of activity at the facility indicates a delay in the implementation of these projects, which are “deemed critical for Russia to achieve its goal of reaching an annual LNG export capacity of 100 million tonnes by 2030.”

–With help from Tom Fevrier.

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