🇺🇸American Businessmen Consider Welcoming🇷🇺Russia’s Novatek to Alaska Gas Reserves
The world is changing much faster than treaties and diplomacy generally seem to admit, and energy is a key variable to follow this trend.
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In a recent article from the New York Times—certainly not a Kremlin mouthpiece—reports that Gentry Beach, an American hedge fund and private equity investor with personal connections extending to Donald Trump Jr. (the President’s eldest son), has signed an agreement with
Novatek’s management to enter the U.S. upstream gas. Novatek would provide key Arctic technologies already developed and used in Russia to exploit immense gas reserves in the Yamal Peninsula. Yes, you are reading correctly: Russian investment is being sought for the development
of American natural gas. First things first: since last August’s Alaska Summit—the first time since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine that a U.S. President has met with Russian President Vladimir Putin—major figures within the Kremlin’s inner circle have been
speaking about joint energy investments, particularly in the Arctic. Kirill Dmitriev, the CEO of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, has been explicit about various business opportunities between Washington and Moscow, including in the energy and transport sectors.
When these
rumblings originate in Russia, they usually find very little space in Western media. Now, however, the situation seems very different, as American investors with strategic political connections are the ones speaking about developing Alaska’s North Slope gas reserves and exporting
them to Asian customers in the form of LNG. Another project sought by the Trump administration with full force, Alaska LNG, aims to develop an 800-km pipeline from the north to the south of Alaska. This would bring natural gas from the same resource basin while building one of
the largest LNG export facilities in the Asia-Pacific: a terminal that could ship gas for decades to come to Asian buyers. A non-trivial detail is that the Trump administration sought to fund this project through the imposition of trade tariffs to Asian countries, which the
Supreme Court has just ruled as invalid.
As Donald Trump seeks a new blueprint to advance his energy fantasies—ehile operating within a democratic state where the separation of powers still functions—there may be voices whispering a solution in his ears:
find an accommodation with the Kremlin to bolster the “American Energy Dominance.”
At this point, everything is possible in this global energy geopolitical scenario.
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