Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin has signed a Decree on expansion of Arctic Capital PDA (area of prioritized social and economic development) in the Murmansk Region. It will include a plot of land in Vidyayevo and a part of Murmansk port’s water area needed to build a facility for handling of liquefied natural gas (LNG), says press center of RF Government.
According to the statement, the economy of the region will get at least RUB 5.83 billion of investments and the investor will obtain a status of PDA resident with advantages including reduced taxes and insurance payments as well as a duty-free zone regime.
The project is to be implemented in 2022–2023. It will let create infrastructure for handling of export LNG bound for Europe and APR countries. New jobs will be created in Vidyayevo. Total tax revenues in 2022-2031 are estimated at RUB 2.6 billion.
With the new LNG handling facility in the region, cargo traffic on the Northern Sea Route will be increased and the cost of LNG delivery to the end users will be reduced.
NOVATEK will build two LNG transshipment complexes at the eastern and western ends of the Arctic route (in the Murmansk and Kamchatka regions) with the aim to ensure efficient and cost-effective LNG transportation. LNG delivered to the terminals by ice-class tankers will be reloaded onto non-ice-class tankers for further delivery.
Temporary Offshore Complex for Transshipment of LNG was put into operation in Murmansk in February 2021. In late November 2020, NOVATEK-Western Arctic, a wholly owned subsidiary of NOVATEK, completed Russia’s first ship-to-ship LNG transshipment in the Kildin Strait of the Barents Sea. The Arc7 ice-class LNG tanker “Nikolay Yevgenov” successfully reloaded an LNG cargo delivered from the Yamal LNG facility at Sabetta to the conventional tanker “Yamal Spirit”.
Arctic Capital PDA was established by RF Government’s Decree No 656 dated 12 May 2020. It is an advanced special economic zone covering the territory of Murmansk and the Kola District of the Murmansk Region. As of today, there are 23 PDAs in the Arctic Zone and in the Far East Federal District of Russia. They number over 560 residents with the total scope of investments under the signed agreements exceeding RUB 4.5 trillion.
By today, investments totaled RUB 1.6 trillion, the number of created jobs – almost 50,000.
PDA are aimed at stimulation of priority industries, attraction of new investors thus contributing to improvement of the standard of living in the region.