Russia’s state-owned energy giant Gazprom has announced plans to significantly ramp up its natural gas exports to China in the coming years. According to Alexei Miller, Gazprom’s CEO, the company will start annual pipeline gas exports of 10 billion cubic meters (bcm) to China in 2027.
Additionally, Miller stated that the existing Power of Siberia pipeline, which began operations in late 2019, will reach its planned capacity of 38 bcm per year by 2025. This pipeline is a crucial part of Gazprom’s efforts to boost gas exports to China, as the company seeks to diversify its market away from Europe, where its gas sales revenues have collapsed due to the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.
In February 2022, just days before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Beijing agreed to purchase gas from Russia’s far-east island of Sakhalin. This gas will be transported via a new pipeline across the Japan Sea to China’s Heilongjiang province.
Russia has also been in negotiations for years regarding the construction of the Power of Siberia-2 pipeline, which would carry 50 bcm of natural gas per year from the Yamal region in northern Russia to China via Mongolia. This pipeline would nearly match the volumes that were previously transported through the now-idle Nord Stream 1 pipeline under the Baltic Sea.
However, the negotiations for the Power of Siberia-2 pipeline have not yet been concluded, primarily due to differences over the price of the gas.