A liquefied natural gas (LNG) tanker carrying cargo from Russia's sanctioned Arctic LNG 2 project berthed at China's Beihai terminal on Tuesday, according to ship-tracking data from Kpler and LSEG.
If the tanker discharges its cargo, that would make it the seventh load that the Chinese terminal has received from the Arctic LNG 2 project, which is under sanctions because of Russia's war in Ukraine.
The Arctic Vostok tanker picked up LNG from a storage facility in Kamchatka, in the Russian Far East, on August 30, before heading towards China's Beihai LNG terminal in the southern region of Guangxi, according to Kpler. LSEG data showed the tanker loaded the cargo on September 6.
The storage facility has only received cargoes from the Arctic LNG 2 project.
Shipping database Equasis lists the tanker's ship or commercial manager as SMP Techmanagement while the registered owner was Lule One Services. Reuters was not able to find any contact information for the registered owner or manager.
PipeChina, operator of the Beihai LNG terminal, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Despite sanctions, Arctic LNG 2, which is 60 per cent owned by Russia's Novatek, has been sending out LNG since last year, with cargoes being delivered to two storage facilities in Russia and the Beihai LNG terminal.
The last two cargoes loaded from the Arctic LNG 2 facility in Gydan in northern Siberia are currently sailing east via the Northern Sea Route on the Christophe De Margerie and Voskhod LNG tankers.
Another sanctioned tanker, La Perouse, which also loaded 150,000 cubic meters of LNG from the sanctioned project, travelled south past Europe, Africa and through the Indian Ocean and is now heading toward the Bay of Bengal, according to LSEG and Kpler data.
Another sanctioned tanker, Arctic Metagaz, which is carrying cargo from Arctic LNG 2, is also currently near China's Beihai LNG terminal. It picked up a cargo from a floating storage facility in Murmansk, northwest Russia, on July 17, according to Kpler data.
This storage facility has also only received cargoes from the Arctic LNG 2 project.
(Reporting by Emily Chow in Singapore and Sam Li in Beijing; Editing by Thomas Derpinghaus.)