Japan and Russia have agreed to throw their support behind a private-sector project to build a liquefied natural gas plant in Russia’s Far East, a Japanese official said Monday. Japanese trade and industry minister Yukio Edano and Russian energy minister Alexander Novak signed a memorandum of understanding on the sidelines of an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in St. Petersburg at the weekend, trade ministry official Tsutomu Kato said. The agreement concerns a plant in Vladivostok that is expected to produce 10 million tonnes of LNG annually — or about 13 percent of Japan’s annual imports — from later this decade, Kato said.
