The Russian president celebrated this Friday the 30th anniversary of Gazprom, the Russian state-owned energy company that Vladimir Putin says continues to grow despite “unfair competition” from the West and international sanctions.
“Despite, say, open and unfair competition and attempts from abroad to hinder and curb its development, Gazprom continues to make progress and launch new projects”Putin said during a video conference.
Putin stressed that the potential and “huge reserves” exploited by the company are “incomparable” to those of other gas-exporting countries.
In 30 years, the company has produced more than 13 billion cubic meters of gas and opened 92 new deposits, adding extraction reserves of nearly 35 billion cubic meters, doubling extraction volumes last year.
“I can assure our consumers that there will be plenty of gas in Russia for many decades to come”underlined Putin.
Gazprom’s plans for the future, according to Putin, fully correspond to the interests, objectives and priorities of Russia as a great power, one of the sovereign centers of the multipolar world.
“The decision to keep it as a single complex turned out to be the right one from a strategic point of view. Gazprom has grown, supported and attracted many sectors and entire regions with its social programs. It has become one of the engines of economic rebirth and growth “evaluated.
The Kremlin leader assured that he had discussed the company’s plans with Gazprom president Alexei Miller as “perestroika” is taking place in Ukraine due to the war. [reconstrução] of supply routes and demand for alternative markets to the European ones.
In this regard, Gazprom reported that “Russia could become China’s largest gas supplier in the near future”.
To that end, the company will soon launch the Force of Siberia-2 pipeline project, which will supply gas to China via Mongolia and begin operation in 2024.
Russia plans to deliver 48 billion cubic meters of gas annually for the next few years, a number far higher than the 15.5 billion delivered in 2022, and it aims to reach 100 billion cubic meters in the future.
The company also considers as one of its priorities the establishment of a large international distribution center in Turkey to circumvent Western sanctions.
For his part, Putin insisted that “gas will be the most valued resource for a long time, a real asset whose demand will not stop growing”.
The Russian president recalled that gas consumption has almost doubled in the past 30 years and predicts that it will increase by at least 20% in the next 20 years.
“More than half of this growth will come from countries in the Asia-Pacific region, especially China, of course, given the growth rates of its economy,” he said.
Russian gas exports fell by 25.1% in 2022, a drastic drop partially offset by a 48% increase in supplies to China, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexandr Novak said this week.
The aforementioned drop in exports “has to do both with objective reasons, with the refusal of European countries to buy Russian gas, and with subversive actions against the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines,” he explained.
Gazprom, the Russian state-owned company, was founded during the Soviet Union (1989), but only went public on February 17, 1993.
Miller, a close ally of the Russian president, has led the consortium since 2001, whose lack of transparency has been widely criticized in the West, which the Kremlin views as an instrument of geopolitical influence.
Source: DN
