The site chosen for Sabetta sits where the Yamal Peninsula meets the Ob estuary, close to the Yuzhno-Tambeyskoye gas field that feeds it. Before construction, this was undifferentiated tundra -- no roads, no rail, no settlement. The groundbreaking ceremony took place in July 2012, a joint venture between Novatek, Russia's largest independent natural gas producer, and the Russian government. Construction of the port itself began in summer 2013. What rose from the permafrost over the following years was not merely a dock but an entire logistics chain: an LNG plant capable of producing 16.5 million tonnes per year, a seaport requiring extensive channel dredging by Belgian firms DEME and Jan De Nul, and Sabetta International Airport to shuttle workers in and out. President Putin formally opened the port and first phase of the plant on 8 December 2017.

Shipping from Sabetta presents a problem that most ports never face: the Ob estuary freezes. The Kara Sea freezes. The entire Northern Sea Route that connects Sabetta to Asian markets can be locked in ice for months. The solution is a fleet of fifteen Yamalmax-class LNG tankers, each designed to break through ice up to 2.1 meters thick. Built by Daewoo Shipbuilding in South Korea and designed by Finland's Aker Arctic Technology, these vessels are among the most specialized ships ever constructed. They carry names that read like a roll call of Russian polar explorers -- Eduard Toll, Rudolf Samoylovich, Nikolay Yevgenov, Vladimir Voronin. When Arctic ice makes the Northern Sea Route impassable, shipments reroute westward to the Fluxys terminal at Zeebrugge, Belgium, before heading to Asia-Pacific markets. The tanker Christophe de Margerie, named for the late CEO of Total, was the first to load LNG at Sabetta in December 2017.

Sabetta did not come cheap, and its financing tells a story of geopolitical ambition. Shareholders provided $10.5 billion in equity. The Russian National Wealth Fund contributed $2.6 billion, Russian banks added $4 billion, and Chinese banks supplied $12 billion in debt. In December 2014, during the Russian financial crisis triggered by collapsing oil prices and Western sanctions over Ukraine, the Russian government gave the project a 150 billion rouble subsidy -- a signal that Yamal LNG was considered strategically untouchable. A $3.22 billion railway proposal to connect Sabetta to the broader Eurasian rail network was approved in March 2017. The Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, the administrative region surrounding Sabetta, holds natural gas reserves representing 80 percent of Russia's total and 15 percent of the world's supply. Sabetta is the keyhole through which much of that gas reaches the sea.

What makes Sabetta unusual among the world's major ports is its total absence of permanent civilian life. It is a shift settlement, populated by workers who fly in for rotations and fly out when their shifts end. There are no schools, no markets, no neighborhoods. The airport exists solely to move labor. The port exists solely to move gas. Even the customs berth -- designed for inspecting foreign ships -- serves a purely industrial function. In 2016, chemical reactors were shipped through Sabetta from South Korea destined for the Pavlodar oil refinery, a rare instance of import traffic at a facility designed almost exclusively for export. The landscape around Sabetta is the same tundra that stretches unbroken across the rest of the Yamal Peninsula -- flat, frozen, and populated only by the reindeer herders whose migration routes the pipeline infrastructure now intersects.