Russian gas from the ‘end of the world’

If a Dutchman cooks on Russian gas, there is a good chance that it comes from Novy Urengoy – a Siberian city that did not exist in 1970. Now 100,000 people live in this place above the Arctic Circle. They can only reach the city by plane or train, there is no highway to the rest of Russia. Non-Russians are only allowed to enter the city with special permission.

Novy Urengoy is one of the main sites where the Russian state-owned company Gazprom drills for gas. The gas that heated swimming pools, households and companies in the Netherlands in recent years partly came from here. With the war in Ukraine, that supply seems to be coming to an end in the coming years.

Over the years, photographer Justin Jin has documented how gas, as well as coal, in this remote, northern region of Russia has transformed the region. Traditionally, the area has been home to the Nenets, a nomadic, indigenous people who travel on reindeer sleds – and breed these animals for meat. But gas drilling and mining have radically changed the character of the region.

It started in 1975 with the discovery of the Urengoy gas field. It turned out to be the second largest gas field in the world, three times the size of the Groningen field. During the Cold War, in 1984, the gas from this reservoir first found its way to Europe, via a pipeline to southwestern Ukraine. Coal mining had already been taking place in the area for some time. Many Russians who had been in the gulag camps stayed in the region after the camp system was ended to work underground – often recognizable by the black circles around their eyes, which can no longer be washed off after a decade to be.

Urengoy is typical of the places where Gazprom gets its gas: they are often remote, desolate areas, in the closed Jamal-Nenets Autonomous Region, the heart of Russia’s gas extraction. It is an area where the ground is permanently frozen, and where there is hardly any vegetation. A few hundred kilometers from Urengoy is the Jamal gas field. It is located beneath the vast peninsula of the same name (‘end of the world’ in the Nenet language) where barely anyone went a few decades ago.