A Russian company secretly funded a project to export natural gas from Alaska — not through a gas pipeline — but with tankers that would ship it directly from the North Slope to markets in Asia.
That's according to a report by the New York Times, which describes the Polar LNG project as competing with the pipeline-focused Alaska LNG project.
When Polar LNG's chief executive resigned in September, he told the Times he had been misled about how at least some of Polar LNG's funding had come from Novatek, a Russian energy giant under partial sanctions because of the war in Ukraine.
New York Times global affairs correspondent Anton Troianovski says, even before revelations about the secret funding, Polar LNG was planning to use some of Novatek's technology.
Listen to the interview at the link above. The following transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Anton Troianovski: The key piece of equipment is called a "gravity-based structure," this giant 640,000-ton concrete-and-steel device that this Russian company Novatech makes that would be placed on the seabed just off the coast. And the idea is you can then put equipment on top of that to refrigerate the gas that can then be loaded directly onto ships.
Casey Grove: Gotcha. But then separately, there was this hidden funding. Can you tell me about that?
AT: The Trump administration has been talking to (Russian President Vladimir) Putin and to senior Russian officials with the goal of ending the war in Ukraine. And one approach that the administration has taken is to engage with Putin and the Russians on economic potential projects. And so Russia has pushed very hard to propose potential business deals, cooperation, especially around energy, to the Trump administration.
So the big picture here is about the war in Ukraine, and one of the projects that the Russians have proposed, and that the U.S., the Trump administration, has engaged on, is this idea to bring special Novatek LNG technology to the North Slope of Alaska. And then, what our story is about, is that the company, the American company that's been established to advance this project, has received hidden funding from Novatek itself. That is according to interviews we did with some of the people involved, including with the former chief executive of this company, Polar LNG, who just resigned recently, as well as some other documents and whatnot that we've seen.
CG: How was it actually hidden?
AT: There was a company in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates that acted as a sort of go-between. The company had a chief operating officer who had spent a long time working at Novatek previously. Documents we saw, as well as the interviews we did, showed that this company, TechWave, still had those ties with Novatek, while also owning and funding Polar LNG.
CG: You quoted the chief executive that had resigned from Polar LNG, Joel Riddle, I think, is his name. He was saying — and I think others, too — were saying that this was not only unlawful, because of the sanctions against Russia, but also not in the best interests of the U.S. And, you know, I think there are a lot of Alaskans that just want the gas to be usable. So why is it not also in the best interests of the U.S.?
AT: Yeah, well, that's a really good point, because this also just shows how this energy project has become tied up in all these geopolitical issues. So Polar LNG makes this argument, makes the argument, that this very much is in the best interests of the U.S.
The criticism is that if there were to be large-scale LNG production on the North Slope, that would obviously be a very strategically valuable asset for the United States. And what Riddle and others question is whether it's in the best interests of the United States to have Russia play a pivotal role in that development. That's the question here, and and that obviously gets at these even bigger geopolitical and philosophical questions of in what sense is Russia a U.S. adversary?
Obviously, the Trump administration has taken a very different line on Russia than prior American administrations have. For President Trump and for his chief negotiators with Russia — Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff — for them, Russia is a potential partner and also a country that can help make Americans better off, right? That's the argument that they're making. But here in Washington, that's definitely a very controversial argument.
