In July, about a week after NATO leaders pledged more military support for Ukraine at their summit in Lithuania, a smiling Russian President Vladimir Putin watched the world’s largest floating structure set off from a construction site in Murmansk, a Russian city on the Barents Sea. The 640,000 ton platform was destined for the Gydan Peninsula in Siberia, where it would link up with infrastructure on land to begin cooling vast quantities of gas into shippable liquid form—eventually producing more than 6 million metric tons of liquified natural gas (LNG) per year from 2024.
The platform—which housed the first so-called train, or production line, of a massive gas extraction and liquefaction project known as Arctic LNG 2—relied heavily on international investment and Western technology. France-based TotalEnergies proudly announced a total 21.6 percent interest in the project when it launched in 2019, alongside investors from China and Japan. (TotalEnergies has since announced that it will no longer provide capital to the project.) The remoteness of the Gydan Peninsula and the freezing Arctic winters mean that Arctic LNG-2 required the world’s best engineers and leading technology to get the gas out of the ground, liquified, and onto tankers. The turbines are state-of-the-art, provided by U.S. engineering firm Baker Hughes. German-founded Linde supplied the heat exchangers needed to cool the gas. The United Kingdom’s Hill & Smith provided cryogenic pipe supports. And Italy’s Saipem played a crucial coordinating role and supplied electrical cables.
In April, the European Union announced a ban on the export of LNG equipment to Russia. Yet despite this, the shipment of the first part of the project was on time—a point that Putin made sure to cover in his televised remarks from Murmansk.
