{"id":397,"date":"2009-02-20T08:28:35","date_gmt":"2009-02-20T04:28:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/?p=397"},"modified":"2009-02-20T08:33:25","modified_gmt":"2009-02-20T04:33:25","slug":"of-lng-and-royalty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/397\/","title":{"rendered":"Of LNG and Royalty"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wednesday of this week saw the official\u00a0opening<\/a> of the operations phase\u00a0of the Sakhalin II Project, and an inauguration ceremony held at the newly built LNG facility on the southern coast of Sakhalin Island.\u00a0 Within a few weeks the project will begin shipping cargoes of LNG to customers in Korea, Japan, and the US.\u00a0 The ceremony was attended by Russian president Dmitri Medvedev and various other dignitaries from Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, and the UK.\u00a0 The UK delegation included\u00a0HRH Prince Andrew the Duke of York, who our Honorary Council\u00a0persuaded to make a detour\u00a0in his trip to open our\u00a0new Honorary Consulate in\u00a0a small ceremony to which I was\u00a0invited.\u00a0\u00a0From this, I can\u00a0confirm that Prince Andrew can\u00a0“work a room” with exceptional skill, has a sharp sense of humour\u00a0which he doesn’t mind\u00a0displaying, and is capable of making\u00a0somewhat direct comments.\u00a0 Considering who his father is, the last one\u00a0shouldn’t come as much of a surprise.\u00a0 I am glad I attended the ceremony and got to meet him.\u00a0 I also had the opportunity to meet the British Ambassador to Moscow and pass on my\u00a0gratitude to her embassy for bollocking the receptionist at the Belgrad Hotel in March 2004 who had dreamt up some problem with my visa which was preventing her from checking me in.\u00a0 The incident happened during the reign of the previous ambassador, but I’m sure she appreciated the comment.<\/p>\n

The inaguration ceremony of the project and the president’s visit received widespread media coverage across Russia, and one of the TV crews from Russia’s Pervii Kanal <\/em>arrived a day or so earlier to make preparations.\u00a0 They did so in the middle of a terrible\u00a0blizzard which dumped about a metre of snow on us in 24 hours (we have had far more snow in my third winter here than in the previous two) and decided to make a small report<\/a> on the conditions in Sakhalin and the presence of foreigners in the capital.\u00a0 The two Australians they interview near the end of the clip are colleagues in my department, the one who speaks Russian I work with daily.<\/p>\n

The construction phase of the Sakhalin II project is now all but over, and the number of expats left here is dwindling rapidly.\u00a0 Since September 2006 I have for the large part been a very small cog…in fact, more like a grease nipple…in the massive machine which has built this project,\u00a0but I’m not going to let modesty stand in the way of letting everyone know that the rock-dumping works I helped carry out on the Yuri Topchev<\/em><\/a>\u00a0<\/em>in December were vital to the LNG facility being able to start up on time.\u00a0 The Sakhalin oil and gas industry has not escaped the financial crisis gripping the world and it now looks as though there will be very little if any further construction works to keep me in employment here.\u00a0 My contract runs out shortly, and I am in the process of looking for a job elsewhere.<\/p>\n

I will have plenty to write about the current situation in Sakhalin closer to my time of departure, and yet more to write about it once I have gone.\u00a0 For reasons I will explain later I am not too unhappy about the prospect of leaving, and in many ways I am looking forward to it.\u00a0 I do not know where I will be going or when, but I am applying for jobs in Japan, Korea, Houston, Perth, Brisbane, Malaysia, Monaco, Paris, Singapore, and Norway.\u00a0 Hopefully something will come up, and by\u00a0mid-year\u00a0my wife and I\u00a0will most likely be gone from here.\u00a0 I’ll let you all know soon enough.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wednesday of this week saw the official\u00a0opening of the operations phase\u00a0of the Sakhalin II Project, and an inauguration ceremony held at the newly built LNG facility on the southern coast of Sakhalin Island.\u00a0 Within a few weeks the project will … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7,46],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/397"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=397"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/397\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=397"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=397"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=397"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}