“Russia is ALREADY exporting natural gas to China”
Russia was exporting gas to China last year (about 7% of its exports). Now it is essentially flowing 100% of the Eastern pipelines capacity (Power of Siberia), and docking a few more shiploads of LNG. They have the physical transport capacity to roughly double what they sold to China in the past - but nowhere near the amount that they are losing from Europe (85% of last year’s exports, from fields thousands of miles from China, with pipelines that only run toward Europe.
Sakhalin can provide a few percentage points more of new LNG capacity in coming years, but the main new capacity planned to transport more gas to China was the Power of Siberia 2 pipeline - planned to go operational in 2030, but the partners withdrew this year after the invasion, and took away the financing. It would have been a 1,600 mile new pipeline from the Yamal fields, from which additional new pipelines were in different stages of planning to distribute it further around China. That is all up in the air now.
Except you claimed in your post # 1 that, “Russia cannot physically move that gas to new customers for the next decade, if ever.”, which is nonsense, since Russia is already moving natural gas to new customers in China and Asia.
Now it is essentially flowing 100% of the Eastern pipelines capacity
Huh? Russian gas flows to Europe are DOWN 82%!
They have the physical transport capacity to roughly double what they sold to China in the past - but nowhere near the amount that they are losing from Europe (85% of last year's exports, from fields thousands of miles from China, with pipelines that only run toward Europe.
They are building new pipelines, with the help of the mighty Chinese industrial machine. Not that the Russians don't have the capacity to build it all themselves. They do. They built the Gazprom pipelines to western Europe after all.
Read this :
‘Moscow unveils details of new gas pipeline to China’
https://www.rt.com/business/562882-russia-china-gas-pipeline/
You seem to forget that China shares a border with Russia and Siberia is closer to China than to Germany.