TotalEnergies benefits from EU sanctions reprieve on Russian gas
French energy major can continue selling LNG from its Yamal project in Siberia to Asian customers
TotalEnergies will be able to continue selling gas from its flagship Siberian project to Asia after the EU bowed to demands to allow European companies to keep shipping Russian liquefied natural gas to countries outside the bloc.
Greece had demanded the LNG sanctions U-turn in exchange for agreeing to an unrelated slate of measures against Moscow. The EU’s move enables Greek shipping company Dynagas to continue making lucrative deliveries of Russian gas around the world.
Three people familiar with the matter said they also expect TotalEnergies to benefit from the decision, as it will be able to continue selling gas to clients in Asia from Yamal LNG, the Siberian mega-project in which the French oil and gas major owns a 20 per cent stake.
The exemption reverses Brussels’ decision last October to ban such shipments from the end of 2026. EU companies will now be able to continue honouring “transfers” of LNG to third countries if the contracts were signed before Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine and volumes do not exceed 2025 levels.
An EU official said that the move was justified because vessels transferring the cargo would otherwise have been “very rapidly repossessed and taken by Chinese operators . . . we would have had a ban but we would not have had an effect on Russian flows”.
Total’s ability to fulfil existing contracts to supply Asian customers will help to offset the impact on the energy company’s business of a ban on imports of Russian LNG to the EU under long-term contracts from the end of this year.
TotalEnergies chief executive Patrick Pouyanné had said in February that “ambiguities” related to the EU ban could force the company to stop shipments altogether from Yamal.
But last week he suggested there could be a reprieve, while stressing that the company was still poring over the EU’s rules.
The new sanctions could enable sales “outside of the EU if we use some EU LNG tankers”, he told analysts on the company’s second-quarter results call last week.
“Honestly, to let Russian LNG be sold outside the EU, not by EU companies but only by our competitors, was a little odd to all the EU companies involved,” Pouyanné added.
The company declined to comment in response to a request by the FT.
Total has now exited most of its Russian ventures after taking hefty charges on its former businesses there in 2022. It confirmed last week that it was in the process of transferring a 10 per cent stake in Arctic LNG, another major Siberian project, to a unit owned by Russia’s Novatek.
But it retains the Yamal stake, and the company has said it would only exit the Siberian project under sanctions.
According to Pouyanné, Total earns about $400mn a year from selling LNG from Yamal, as well as dividends from its 20 per cent stakes in both Yamal and parent company Novatek, although these have been irregular in recent years.
Contracts are linked to the price of Brent crude, he told analysts last week, meaning that Total has increased its earnings from the plant owing to higher oil prices triggered by conflict in the Middle East.
Most of Yamal’s cargoes are currently sent to Europe, with a record 9.89mn tonnes being sent from the gas project to EU ports and just 510,000 tonnes sent to Asia in the first half of 2026.
But the sanctions decision paves the way for Total and Novatek to use Dynagas’s fleet of ice-class LNG tankers to ship more gas to China.
One industry expert said that traders expect Total to be “happy” about the latest sanctions package, as the company will be able to continue shipping gas from Yamal as long as it is within the existing terms of their contracts.
A commission official said the LNG exemption was “limited to the transfer of Russian LNG to third countries”, or to purchases linked to transfers.
The official added that the transportation of LNG from Sakhalin-2, a project in eastern Russia, has also been exempted from sanctions until March 31 2028, to avoid disruptions to gas supplies for Japan and South Korea.