A second gas carrier has departed from Russia’s US-sanctioned Portovaya LNG plant on the Baltic Sea after a hiatus, in search of a foreign buyer, showing Russia’s continued efforts to flout restrictions on LNG sales, LSEG data showed on Wednesday.
According to the ship-tracking data, gas carrier Valera, previously named Velikiy Novgorod, had departed from the Gulf of Finland. It was due to arrive at an unspecified location on January 15, the data showed.
The tanker is the second to leave the plant in the past three months.
The first tanker, Perle, formerly known as Pskov, was shown on ship tracking data leaving Portovaya in mid-July, and on Wednesday was moving north-west in the Strait of Malacca. It has discharged LNG at an unknown location.
The small-scale Portovaya LNG plant, which has a production capacity of 1.5 million tonnes of LNG per year, started operations in September 2022. Exports had been suspended in February this year following the introduction of the US sanctions.
At the early stages of its operations, most cargoes from Portovaya had been delivered to Turkey and Greece. Supply markets subsequently widened to China, Spain and Italy.
In September, Russia delivered a first cargo to China from its new Arctic LNG 2 plant, also under US sanctions, reviving the project, which started output in December 2023 but had been unable to sell the frozen gas due to the restrictions.
To circumvent sanctions on its oil and gas, Russia uses its so-called shadow fleet, made up mainly of ageing vessels with opaque ownership.
Shadow fleet tankers usually turn off the automatic identification system (AIS) that signals their location, or manipulate it to send fake tracking data – a tactic commonly used by crews camouflaging their activities and known as spoofing.
(Reporting by Reuters; Editing by Aidan Lewis)
