WSJ: Russian Arctic LNG Project to Name Shippers, Ports in March

Russia's $27 billion Yamal liquefied-natural-gas project will name by the middle of March the shipping companies that will move LNG on icebreaking tankers from the Arctic to ports in Europe and Asia, people with knowledge of the matter said.

The vessels will supply Asian markets for three months in the summer and will travel west for the remainder of the year to European ports, where the LNG will be moved to other ships. The project managers are looking at several potential European transfer ports, with France's Dunkirk and Belgium's Zeebrugge the front-runners, and will decide by the end of the first quarter, the people said.

The giant LNG plant at the remote Yamal Peninsula is one of the world's biggest gas projects and Moscow's first foray to extract the vast natural resources that lay below the Arctic's ice.

Yamal LNG, developed jointly by France's Total SA,  Russia's gas producer OAO Novatek and China National Petroleum Corp., needs 16 ships that will each carry 170,000 cubic meters of LNG through six-foot-thick ice after operations start in 2017. Each ship costs around $350 million, or $150 million more than standard LNG ships.  MORE