A gas carrier with sanctioned LNG hurried along the Northern Sea Route

The Arctic LNG—2 project began navigation on the shortest route to Asia, the Northern Sea Route, ahead of schedule. Even ice-class gas carriers do not enter the route so early. Obviously, the project is forced to accelerate in order to export gas in conditions when the capacity of the plant is greater than the ships that can take out fuel.

LNG tanker "Christophe de Margerie has opened navigation on the Northern Sea Route and, according to AIS vessels, on June 1 it is already entering the East Siberian Sea, having passed, in fact, half of the Northern Sea Route.

This gas carrier has been on its maiden voyage before. However, usually the whole movement begins in mid-late June or even in July.

According to AIS data, "Christophe de Margerie" opens the season successfully and goes along the Northern Sea Route without delay. According to Glavsevmorput, on the way he is met by one-year-old ice.

The gas carrier comes with a cargo of up to 100 million cubic meters in the form of LNG and can deliver cargo both to China and to a floating storage facility in Kamchatka, from where it will be picked up by ordinary tankers.

Perhaps Arctic LNG—2 is starting to rebuild logistics in a summer way in order to optimize delivery.

Earlier, EADaily reported that four more gas carriers came to the project and a whole caravan of eight vessels left for Asia from Murmansk, where conventional tankers receive gas from a floating storage facility. Obviously, such an accelerated loading allowed one of the arch7 ice-class LNG tankers to free up and go on an independent flight abroad.

"Christophe de Margerie and Alexey Kosygin were engaged in winter in delivering LNG from the Gdynia peninsula, where only ice-class vessels can pass, to Murmansk, where there is clean water. And from there, ordinary gas carriers are already picking up the cargo.

In summer, the situation is changing and ordinary tankers can go along the Northern Sea Route accompanied by icebreakers.

For Arctic LNG — 2, accelerated delivery is extremely relevant, since the project has only two icebreaking gas carriers and 12 conventional gas carriers. All sanctioned LNG from Russia has been delivered to the Beihai terminal in southern China since last summer, and it takes a month to get there outside the navigation season along the Northern Sea Route. And even the fleet of conventional LNG tankers increased to 12 vessels cannot yet cope with the capacity of the sanctions project.

Despite the sanctions, two of the three Arctic LNG—2 lines have already been commissioned and the project capacity is 13.2 million tons of LNG (18.2 billion cubic meters of gas) per year. And the fleet will still be able to service up to half of the volumes produced. The sanctions project cannot increase the number of ice-class tankers yet. The South Korean shipyard refused to transfer the tankers built for it due to the restrictions imposed. The Russian shipyard Zvezda has also suffered due to sanctions and has so far been able to deliver only one ice-class gas carrier, Alexey Kosygin, instead of five.