March 31, 2026 [Yahoo Finance]- A longtime oil and gas executive with links to the Trump family plans to use equipment from a sanctioned Russian gas project to open a major new export terminal in Alaska, he told Semafor.

The project, dubbed Polar LNG, will eventually require $8-9 billion in investment and aims to have a capacity of 21 million tons per year, which would rank it among the largest LNG terminals in the country, with the first exports shipping out before Trump’s term ends, CEO Joel Riddle said.

The spike in natural gas prices caused by the war in Iran, Riddle said, was generating “hurricane-force winds behind us to accelerate this project,” which would create a path for US gas to more readily reach markets in Asia. A separate project called Alaska LNG is racing ahead in parallel, but Polar LNG is angling to leapfrog it by buying LNG hardware and service ships that were originally destined for Russia’s Arctic 2 LNG terminal, which was sanctioned by the Biden administration, including equipment that is already located inside Russia. Acquiring pre-built equipment is critical for the project’s “speed to market,” Riddle said: “From a cold start, this would be impossible.”

That will require permission from the Treasury Department, which Riddle said he will be “laser-focused” on obtaining in the coming months. A Treasury Department spokesperson declined to comment. One investor in the project, Riddle said, is Gentry Beach, a college friend of Trump’s son Donald Jr. who has been pursuing a wide range of global energy and mineral deals through his firm America First Global.