Methane: "Russia Goes For Global Gas Dominance"

From OilPrice, December 30:

Despite the newly announced U.S. sanctions against the Nord Stream 2 project, Russia says it will build and launch next year the natural gas pipeline that has divided Europe for half a decade.

With Nord Stream 2, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin will have several major natural gas projects completed in the past few years, Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist Leonid Bershidsky writes.

These projects will complete Putin’s plan to have Moscow not only continue holding a large share of gas supplies to Europe, but branch out Russian gas exports to the fastest growing gas import market, China, and seize a growing share of the global liquefied natural gas (LNG) market.

Nord Stream 2 is the latest project in Putin’s plan for energy and geopolitical dominance in the world. Russia already holds a third of Europe’s gas imports. Nord Stream 2, when completed—because Russia believes it will be completed next year despite the sanctions—is set to further solidify Moscow’s reach into the north European market bypassing Ukraine.

Before Nord Stream 2, Russia will have launched TurkStream, through which Russia’s gas giant Gazprom will carry pipeline gas to Turkey and south and southeastern Europe—a region already heavily dependent on Russian gas supplies. Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan are set to officially launch the TurkStream gas pipeline on January 8.

Early in December, Gazprom—which also leads the Nord Stream 2 project to carry Russian gas to Germany—launched the huge Power of Siberia pipeline project to deliver gas to China, whose gas consumption and imports are only set to increase over the coming years and decades.    

While Gazprom is launching new pipelines east and west, Russia’s largest private gas producer Novatek is boosting its presence on the global LNG market. Novatek, which already exports LNG from the Yamal LNG plant, gave in September the go-ahead to its second large LNG project, Arctic LNG 2 on the Gydan Peninsula.

This year, Russia has supplied large volumes of LNG to Europe, apart from its pipeline supplies which account for a third of the European Union’s (EU) gas imports.
In Q2 2019, thanks to the LNG supply glut and converging prices, the EU’s LNG imports jumped by 102 percent on the year, with Russia accounting for 19 percent of LNG imports, second only to Qatar with 30 percent, and ahead of the U.S. with 12 percent, the European Commission’s Quarterly Report on European Gas Markets shows....

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