A Natural Gas Project Off Alaska’s Coast May Be a Russian Ploy for Intel on the Arctic
For this project, businessmen from the United Arab Emirates were touting a plan to tap the vast natural gas reserves that lay beneath the tundra of Alaska’s North Slope.
Key points
- The proposal to create an LNG processing plant on Alaska’s coast has already put reams of scientific data about the strategically critical region within reach of Novatek’s leader, an oligarch who is close to President Vladimir Putin, a ProPublica investigation found.
- arm, Polar Train LNG, resigned, questioned the operation’s legality and asserted it was a Russian ploy to gain control of a strategic U.S.
- security, said Troy Bouffard, director of the Center for Arctic Security and Resilience at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.
More than 100 miles off the coast, the Navy’s fast-attack nuclear submarines sometimes practiced surfacing through the thick Arctic ice.
While the contractors performing the work were American, the UAE company paying for the surveys was actually being steered by Russia’s liquefied natural gas giant, Novatek — a company under partial U.S.
Additional details
- To an outsider, the research boats bobbing in the frigid and stormy Beaufort Sea off Alaska would seem little cause for alarm.
- Such information is highly valuable in the ever-changing and unpredictable Arctic, with its potential routes for both naval ships and missiles.
- Documents show that their work was not far, as the crow flies, from the start of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System — a cornerstone of U.S.
- But the extent to which the company gathered detailed information about sensitive areas of Alaska has not been previously disclosed.
- The surveyors last year used specialized equipment to map the depth and shape of the seabed, collect samples of shallow marine sediments and conduct sonar scans to check for obstructions such as shipwrecks.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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