TotalEnergies confirmed on 27 August that the transfer of its 10% interest in Arctic LNG 2 to NordLine, a Novatek subsidiary, has completed. The company is no longer a shareholder. It retains a claim to reimbursement of roughly US$1.3 billion in shareholder loans, though any payment remains subject to sanctions. Russian authorities approved the transaction in June 2026, necessary because exits by foreign companies now require presidential authorisation. TotalEnergies had already written down $4.1 billion on the stake in 2022. It still holds 19.4% of Novatek and 20% of Yamal LNG, neither of which it can sell under current sanctions.
The problem was never money; it was machines
This is the part worth understanding if you work with rotating equipment, because it is an unusually clear illustration of supply-chain concentration.
An LNG train works by refrigeration on an enormous scale, cooling gas to around minus 162 degrees Celsius so it becomes liquid. The heart of that is a set of very large refrigerant compressors and their drivers, typically aeroderivative or heavy-duty gas turbines, or increasingly large electric motors. They are among the biggest and most specialised rotating machines built anywhere.
And they are made by a very small number of companies, nearly all Western. There is no broad competitive market for a main refrigerant compressor train the way there is for a process pump. Design, manufacture, string testing and commissioning of one runs to years.
Sanctions did not stop Arctic LNG 2 by cutting off finance. They stopped it by removing access to that equipment and the engineering support behind it: the vendor specialists who commission the trains, the spare parts, the control system updates. A project can survive losing an investor. It cannot easily replace a compression train that only a handful of firms on earth can build.
The general lesson outstrips this project
Every operator carries some machines whose supply is effectively single-source, not because of a contract but because only one or two manufacturers make that size, that service, that specification. It looks like a procurement detail right up until something interrupts it: sanctions, insolvency, a factory fire, a two-year order book.
Worth asking of your own plant: which machines could you not replace within a year, and what is the plan if you had to?
On the commercial side, the $1.3 billion loan claim is the detail to watch. TotalEnergies keeps the right to repayment but cannot collect while sanctions hold — an asset on paper with no route to cash. And it remains locked into Novatek and Yamal, unable to sell those either. Exiting Russia, for the companies that stayed longest, has turned out to be less a decision than a process.
