Ongoing development of new liquefied natural gas (LNG) projects in Russia will allow it to seize a 15-percent share of the global LNG market, Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak wrote in an article in the Russian magazine Energy Policy.
Since Russia began LNG exports in 2009 with the Sakhalin-2 project, its exports of LNG have increased 4.5 times, Novak said.
While Russian gas export monopoly, Gazprom, has been busy launching new pipelines east and west – the Power of Siberia to China and TurkStream to Turkey – 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 2019 the go-ahead to its second large LNG project, Arctic LNG 2 on the Gydan Peninsula.
The Russian government is helping Novatek with its LNG projects in the Arctic.
The Arctic area could become the key driver of Russia’s natural gas production in less than two decades, as it has the potential to produce 90 percent of all the gas produced in Russia by 2035, a senior government official said in October last year.
“The Arctic’s contribution in the oil and gas sector will continue to grow, we can really bring gas production to 90% of the national level and to a quarter of all oil production in Russia,” Alexander Krutikov, Russia’s Deputy Minister for the Development of the Russian Far East and the Arctic, said back then.
Krutikov was presenting a strategy for the development of the Arctic regions in Russia, in which energy and chemicals will play leading roles.
The Arctic region is also key to Russia’s ambitions to be a dominant player in the global LNG market, Krutikov said.
Russia is supporting its companies with tax breaks, waivers on extraction taxes, and other incentives in order to develop its Arctic areas.
