OREANDA-NEWS   The Iris liquefied natural gas (LNG) tanker, formerly known as North Sku, is most likely heading to the Russian Arctic LNG-2 project, which stopped production last fall. This is reported by Bloomberg with reference to vessel tracking data.

Novatek planned to start shipping fuel from the plant in the winter of 2024, but a few months before that, the project came under US sanctions. The main problem was the lack of gas carriers of the required class.

The company was unable to obtain the vessels already built for Arctic LNG-2, and it turned out to be too difficult to find a suitable replacement on the market. As a result, the first LNG shipments were shipped only in summer, when the seas are ice-free. Nevertheless, even this cargo turned out to be difficult to sell: potential customers were not ready to take the risk of being sanctioned.

Last fall, it became clear that the plant had stopped producing LNG because there was nowhere to store it and nothing to export it with. In the spring, satellite images showed that there was some activity at the enterprise, the nature of which experts found it difficult to determine unequivocally.