The COVID-induced recession that has brought oil and gas prices down to levels that are painful enough for most if not all major producers. In Russia the crisis has hit the populace much more than it did the government – after all, the former had in most cases no (currency) reserves to rely on as a safety buffer. Russian companies remain somewhere in the middle of the suffering scale, most have cut capital expenditure and postponed major projects a couple of years down the road. NOVATEK, a company hardly known to the Western world 5 years ago that has morphed into Russia’s prime LNG producer and exporter, has managed to avail itself of an oft-forgotten but still pertinent way of keeping the company’s financials afloat – government help. The Arctic LNG-2 project has been for some years already. In many ways it is a natural continuation of what NOVATEK […]