The Minutes of the Academic Council meeting dated 20.07.2022
The third meeting of the Academic Council of the Institute for Energy and Finance was held on July 20, 2022 by webinar.
The meeting was devoted to the topic “Prospects for Russian gas exports to the EU and the possibilities of replacing Russian gas on the European market.”
The following speakers presented their reports:
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V.V. Ermakov, Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies;
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V.A. Kulagin, Head of the Department for Research on the World and Russian Energy Complexes at the Institute of Energy Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences;
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A.M. Belogoryev, Deputy Principal Director for Energy studies at the Institute for Energy and Finance.
The meeting participants generally expressed similar positions on the following issues:
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the current situation cannot be assessed under the business as usual scenario, since political motives clearly take precedence over economic rationality;
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replacing Russian gas (which, in retrospect, was one of the lowest‑cost energy sources in the EU) means, even without taking into account the risk of a gas balance deficit, higher price dynamics on the European gas market in the 2020s than previously expected;
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the main source of short- and long-term replacement of Russian gas in the EU is the reduction of gas consumption, including its rationing for industrial enterprises, which creates significant economic risks for maintaining the competitiveness of European non-energy exports;
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Russia has no opportunities to redirect pipeline gas supplies from the EU to alternative markets (in comparable volumes) in the 2020s, while the average margin of alternative supplies will be lower.
The speakers’ presentations aroused great interest and sparked lively discussion among the meeting participants. Among the issues discussed were, in particular, the reasons for the weak manifestation of the price mechanism in Europe, the impact of a possible change of elites in the EU on relations with Russia and, in particular, on the energy market, the impact on PJSC Gazprom of reduced supplies to the EU and the redirection of flows to Eastern countries, the possibilities of supplying Russian gas to the EU via Turkey, the possibilities of changing contractual terms, the relevance of maintaining the “green” agenda for Russian producers of energy raw materials, and others.
The Members of the Academic Council — Gromov A. I., Ivanova N. I., Konoplyanik A. A. — spoke at the meeting.