Oh yes, I’m sure they do. As much as they can. Which is—incidentally—not all that much. Because China has a rather inconvenient problem: it has no good way to store large volumes of gas. Geology, that stubbornly uncooperative thing, refuses to play along. Asian geology does not lend itself to the kind of vast underground storage facilities Europe relies on. Those caverns are rare there, difficult to build, and ruinously expensive.
So if China cannot use LNG immediately, it has exactly one option: above-ground, circular storage tanks. And those are anything but trivial. They are expensive—very expensive—and there is no infinite supply of them waiting politely in reserve. LNG tanks must be cryoproof. This is not oil sloshing around at ambient temperature. These structures are far more complex to build than oil tanks, demand specialized materials, elaborate insulation, and obsessive engineering. All of which takes time. And money. A lot of both.
Naturally, you don’t overbuild such things. No sane operator does. Which means the system in China has almost no slack in it. Very little flexibility. No generous buffer to absorb sudden inflows. They will hit tank tops sooner rather than later—and then what?
That’s the part nobody likes to talk about.
This arrangement is, at best, a short-term stopgap for Russia. A temporary pressure valve. If they don’t find somewhere to put their LNG, they will eventually have to curtail production. And curtailing gas production is not like switching off a light. It’s a slow, complex, high-risk process where many things can—and will—go wrong. Especially in Russia, where maintenance culture and operational discipline are not exactly legendary.
Once you start throttling LNG production, restarting it cleanly is another gamble entirely. Damage accumulates. Failures cascade. Things break quietly and then catastrophically.
Which is why this is not a comforting development for Yamal LNG. Not at all.