A consortium consisting of Japan’s JGC and Norway’s Aker Solutions has won a front-end engineering design contract for A-Property’s planned Yakutia LNG export project in Russia.
A-Property said in a statement it had shortlisted three from thirteen firms to win the project’s FEED contract after launching a tender last year.
The firms included Technip Energies, McDermott, and JGC in consortium with Aker Solutions. Technip previously completed the pre-FEED study for the project.
JGC and Aker Solutions have already started work which should last about two years.
A-Property expects to take a final investment decision on the first phase of the project at the end of 2023 and launch it in 2027.
The firm also needs to secure the right to export LNG.
Production could start in 2027
This award follows a preliminary deal A-Property signed with China’s Zhejiang Energy.
Under the deal, Zhejiang Energy would offtake volumes and buy a 10 percent stake in A-Property’s two companies developing the Yakutia LNG project on Russia’s far east.
These include gas and condensate producer Yatek and Globaltek. The latter is developing the technical solutions and the LNG plant that would use fuel from Yatek’s fields.
Moscow-based A-Property, led by Russian businessman Albert Avdolyan, said the project could be worth about 5 billion euros ($5.7 billion), meaning that Zhejiang Energy would spend about 500 million euros on the stake.
Also, the firm plans to develop the project in two stages. At full capacity, it would have the capability to produce 18 million tonnes per annum of LNG.
A-Property also said that the project involves building a 1358 kilometers long pipeline that would connect Yatek’s fields in Yakutia to the LNG plant near Ayan on the Sea of Okhotsk.
The firm expects Yatek’s gas reserves to rise to 567 billion cubic meters in the third quarter of 2022.
These reserves could rise to as much as 1 trillion cubic meters by 2025, which would be sufficient to support the implementation of the LNG project, it said.