Deputy Prime Minister Novak: Russia has the resources to increase gas supplies to Europe
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Russia's gas resources are huge and therefore fuel supplies to Europe could be increased, but their development takes time and investment. Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak said this on the air of the Rossiya-1 TV channel.
“We have always advocated that long-term contracts, first of all, be the system of energy security for consumers who use such energy carriers,” he commented. Novak also stressed that last year Russia fulfilled all of its long-term contracts. “We delivered much more to Germany, to Turkey, to other countries that chose their volumes,” he added.
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Novak spoke about the need for long-term contracts at the end of December. “When imports in Europe amount to about 250-300 billion cubic meters of gas, then it is necessary to understand where it will come from and, in my opinion, rely primarily on a long-term contract,” the Deputy Prime Minister pointed out. According to his forecasts, the price of gas in Europe will remain high in 2022.
Gas prices in Europe reached their all-time high of $2,190.4 per thousand cubic meters on December 21, 2021. By January, however, the cost of fuel had fallen to almost a thousand dollars. On Friday, January 14, the cost of natural gas on European stock exchanges soared by more than 10 percent, again breaking the mark of 1.1 thousand dollars per thousand cubic meters.
At the same time, underground gas storage facilities (UGS) in Europe have been emptied by more than half. As Sergei Kapitonov, gas analyst at the Skolkovo Energy Center, pointed out, this volume should be enough for the winter.
Earlier, the head of the International Energy Agency (IEA), Fatih Birol, said that the cause of the gas crisis in Europe is the actions of Russia, which are expressed in the deliberate containment of supplies. In his opinion, the Russian company, if desired, could easily increase pumping. Some countries have already begun to allocate money to compensate residents for increased energy bills. For example, Sweden has allocated 6 billion crowns ($664 million) to mitigate the effects of a sharp increase in gas costs. Subsidies will be received by 1.8 million households whose electricity consumption exceeds 2,000 kilowatt-hours per month.
