The US is “very focused on ensuring” Russia is not able to develop new liquefied natural gas projects, one of the country’s senior diplomats said.
The remarks by Geoffrey Pyatt, the US assistant secretary of state for energy resources, to the FT’s Commodities Summit related to Russia’s Arctic LNG 2 project, which is led by private company Novatek.
The US put the flagship project under direct sanctions in November, in effect blocking its stakeholders from getting LNG. Novatek, however, is also developing another major project in the Murmansk region.
“Our goal is to ensure that Arctic LNG 2 is dead in the water,” Pyatt said, adding that while he cannot preview future sanction actions, “we’re very focused on ensuring that Russia is not able to develop new [LNG] projects in order to [redirect] the gas that it had previously sent into Europe”.