They must think we are stupid.
The US/EU sabotaged the gas pipeline to EU, and the US/EU continues to import russkie gas & oil through middlemen at a higher cost to them.
There’s no shortage of energy customers and a “refusal to commit” is meaningless except that China will lock-out price increases without a contract, which the russkies are quite famous in their fidelity to perform. China has no gas/oil. They have to import.
The US is a net exporter of oil and gas.
The EU is not one thing. Much of it (Spain, France, etc) weren’t serviced by Russian gas pipelines. These have all built out LNG facilities. Poland and etc did an alternate thing pre-2022 by helping create the Norwegian gas pipelines.
The problem with Russian natural gas is that the previous iteration requires pipelines, running from the gas fields to the users, and thus necessarily constitute a sole-source monopoly.
Its like being your electric utility, but outside the reach of your legal-political system. You are dependent on your utility, and cant easily switch if that power company decides to send goons to beat up your neighbor.
Europe has effectively switched to the Spanish-French model of LNG, which comes on ships and is therefore, like oil/petroleum, a global commodity. If you have political-blackmail problems with supplier A, there are suppliers B through Z that would be happy to send you their gas.
China is being smart in refusing to commit. China, with respect to Russian gas in its Siberian basin (not the same source as for the Euro pipelines), is a monopsony. It is the sole significant buyer. Dependence on pipeline gas is a potential handcuff to national policy.
“According to BP, China’s domestic production of crude oil was 3.836 million barrels a day in 2019 — not insignificant, but still well behind the U.S.’s 17.045 or Saudi Arabia’s 11.832 — putting China in 7th place worldwide for production.”
Gas must be either chilled into a liquid or piped. The Russian/Chinese pipeline deal was to ship gas (as in gaseous form) via a pipeline that isn’t finished. The problem was one of finance. The Russians wanted the Chinese to pay for the pipeline as well as the gas it contained. The recent trip by Putin to China was an attempt to secure the deal. He failed. China is hard up for the cash and probably wanted to pay in Yuan and the Russians probably wanted it in Rubles.
As for the sabotage of the Russian/European pipeline, does it make sense for the US or the Germans to sabotage it as it was the Russians who turned it off? Gazprom was under contract to supply the gas or to pay for an alternative supply if, for some reason they could not supply the gas. The most likely culprit was Gazprom as they were on the hook for millions of Euros because they were not able to supply the gas. Therefore, they claimed force majeure.* So you have to ask, who actually benefited from the sabotage? Gazprom was trying to protect the assets they had in Germany from seizure for failure to pay the penalty clauses in their contract. (The German government nationalized their assets anyway.)
*A force majeure clause is a provision in a contract that allows both parties to be released from their obligations in case of unforeseeable and unavoidable catastrophes. These catastrophes can be natural disasters or human-made events that cause severe disruption to the expected course of events. A force majeure clause can provide protection from penalties, fees, or liabilities arising from non-performance of the contract
The story is a bunch of baloney. China needs gas more than Russia needs to sell it and nobody will build a pipeline under such conditions.