Photographer Page

Charles Xelot

The Russian Orthodox church at Sabetta was blessed in 2015 by the Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia.

Workers live in several villages at Sabetta. The plant stays open year-round, shipping LNG from its ice-bound port.

In 2016 welders were finishing work on the metal wall of a tank that can hold 160,000 cubic meters of LNG at minus 160 degrees C (minus 256 degrees F).

At sunset, when the lights come on at the Sabetta plant, it looks almost like a small city—which in a way it is.

The Sabetta plant at three a.m. on a February morning. In February of this year it shipped its ten millionth ton of LNG.

Gas burns at a drill site on the Yamal Peninsula. During drilling here and elsewhere in the world, excess gas that can't be brought to market is routinely flared—usually, in less empty places, from a tall stack.

On a winter's day at Sabetta, only the flare stacks and smoke plumes of the Sabetta plant are visible above the fog.

Light from an ice-breaker pierces a snowstorm on the Kara Sea, near the Yamal Peninsula. The sea surface is frozen much of the year.

At night in the Kara Sea, powerful searchlights illuminate the ice ahead for the officers on the bridge of the Christophe de Margerie. Built by Daewoo in South Korea, the ship is nearly a thousand feet long, can carry 172,000 cubic meters of LNG—around 85,000 tons—and can reach a speed of five knots through five-foot-thick ice.

Nurlan is one of many workers at the Yamal LNG plant come who from Kazakhstan, which is also a major producer of oil and gas.