The deal with Total ends the years of jockeying for Shtokman by the international energy companies.

In 2005, Gazprom announced a short-list that included Statoil, Total, Chevron, Norsk Hydro, and ConocoPhillips. But in the end, Gazprom declared that it wasn’t going to share the project with any outside companies. Of course, it didn’t have the ability to undertake the project alone. And that meant that the project would be delayed for years, even though it had all of the necessary ecological and safety approvals from the Russian government.

But then Gazprom suddenly announced that the development of Shtokman, which holds 3.7 trillion cubic meters (129.5 Tcf) of gas and 31 million tons (about 200 million barrels) of condensate, was going forward with Total as the key foreign partner. Shtokman’s potential reserves make it one of the world’s largest natural gas and condensate fields. It will also be one of the most technically challenging. Located in the central part of the Barents Sea, it is within 600 kilometers of the port of Murmansk and has water depths from 320 to 340 meters. Produced gas will be exported via pipeline to Europe, and perhaps to the U.S. in the form of LNG.