OREANDA-NEWS Deliveries of liquefied natural gas (LNG) from Novatek's Russian Arctic LNG-2 project may be postponed indefinitely due to the lack of gas carriers. The new package of US sanctions announced last week disrupted the supply of three ships already built from the South Korean Hanwha Ocean shipyard, and there is nothing else to carry fuel on, Kommersant writes.

In total, the company is building six LNG tankers of the Arc7 ice class for the project, three of them (Peter Kapitsa, Lev Landau and Zhores Alferov) for Sovcomflot structures, and three more (Ilya Mechnikov, Nikolai Semenov and Nikolai Basov) — on request Japanese Mitsui OSK Lines (MOL). In 2022, Hanwha terminated the contract with the Russian company due to the difficulty of making payments, but the construction of gas carriers continued.

The head of Novatek, Leonid Mikhelson, said at the time that the agreements had been transferred to other companies. As it became clear from the explanation of the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) of the United States, these companies were Cypriot Elixon Shipping, Azoria Shipping and Glorina Shipping, which are structures of Sovcomflot and are now on the same sanctions list.

As the newspaper notes, it is unlikely that the South Korean shipyard will interact with these structures, although on February 12, Dubai New Transshipment FZE became the owner of the Peter Kapitsa tanker.

Meanwhile, the delivery of the remaining three tankers is delayed. They have not been sanctioned yet, but Hanwha Ocean is breaking deadlines. MOL explained that the shipyard does not have enough manpower. However, the sources of the publication among shipbuilders refute this information, claiming that at least the tanker Ilya Mechnikov is almost ready and can be delivered in March.