Another tanker carrying liquefied natural gas from Russia’s sanctioned Arctic LNG 2 project has docked in a Chinese port, ship-tracking data showed, days after Russian President Vladimir Putin met China’s leader Xi Jinping in Beijing.
The LSEG tracking data indicated the Russian Voskhod LNG tanker was anchored at an LNG terminal in the port of Tieshan in China’s southwestern province of Guangxi.
The Russian flagged tanker, with a cargo of 150,000 cubic metres of LNG, was loaded up at the Arctic LNG 2 facility in Gydan in northern Siberia on July 19, LSEG data showed.
The cargo is the second from the sanctioned project to dock in China after sanctioned tanker Arctic Mulan arrived at the Beihai LNG terminal in late August. Arctic Mulan’s cargo was the first from Arctic LNG to reach an end-user since it started up last year.
Reuters was not immediately able to ascertain if the LNG was discharged at Tieshan port, and telephone calls to the port went unanswered.
The Arctic project began production in December 2023, but is behind schedule in supplying cargoes of the gas, because of shortages of ice-class gas carriers and Western sanctions over Russia’s conflict with Ukraine.
The cargo arrives days after Putin’s high-profile trip to China for the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit and a military parade to celebrate the end of World War Two.
Arctic LNG 2, 60%-owned by Russia’s Novatek, was set to become one of the country’s largest LNG plants, with target output of 19.8 million metric tons per year, but sanctions have clouded its prospects.
Last year, eight cargoes were loaded from Arctic LNG 2 onto several sanctioned LNG vessels, Kpler data shows, four of them discharged into the Koryak FSU.
This year, six known cargoes have been loaded from the project, with some sanctioned tankers travelling east along the Northern Sea Route.
Two tankers are now berthed on the Kamchatka peninsula in the Russian far east, with a third in the South China Sea between Taiwan and Hainan island, according to LSEG data.
(Additional reporting by Lewis Jackson in Beijing; Editing by Tom Hogue and Clarence Fernandez)