Uh, no. There are no existing pipelines for Russian gas, outside of Europe. They don't exist.
Go east? Why China’s not going to save Russia’s energy exports anytime soon
Can Russia now divert its energy exports to China? In fact, Russia’s energy strategy has been “pivoting to Asia” for over a decade, investing in new oil and gas pipelines, expanding railroad capacity, and boosting LNG transportation to supply the Chinese market. So the more precise question is: how quickly can that effort be accelerated?
The answer: Not much.
A fuel-by-fuel review of Russia’s energy exports reveals that China will not be Russia’s savior any time soon: Russian energy exports to the east face major resource constraints, logistical bottlenecks, and political issues.
Let’s start with oil. The primary Russia export route to China is the East Siberian pipeline (ESPO), which shipped about 700,000 barrels of oil a day in 2021. An additional 900,000 barrels of oil a day were shipped by tanker.
There’s little room for immediate expansion, given constraints in both pipeline capacity and marine terminals. In fact, sending oil by tanker could prove difficult, as traders and shippers shy away from Russian oil. If anything, Russian oil exports to China might even decline over the next year.
Russian gas exports to China have more room to grow. Unused capacity in the existing Power of Siberia 1 pipeline means there’s modest space —at least in theory—for Gazprom to increase its gas deliveries to northeast China over the next few years. But the problem is at the source: the gas resources of East Siberia are modest compared to West Siberia. Moreover, Gazprom is not going to be able to fully develop its two major East Siberian fields, Chayanda and Kovykta, until the mid-2020s at the earliest.
A small additional source could be Sakhalin Island. At the now infamous “friendship with no limits” summit on Feb. 4. Putin and Xi Jinping announced an extension to the existing Sakhalin-Vladivostok pipeline But both sides still need to agree on where the pipeline will cross into China. One option would be a point halfway between Komsomolsk and Vladivostok, which would require only a short spur into China. The other option, to join with the existing crossing-point of PoS-1 at Blagoveshchensk, would require nearly 600km of new pipeline, and would presumably not be available until the mid-2020s. This all assumes, of course, that production could be quickly scaled up at Sakhalin, which also requires additional investment.
Adding everything up, Gazprom could probably supply an additional 28 billion cubic meters of gas to China by 2025—only a fraction of the 155 billion cubic meters Russia supplied to Europe in 2021.
The proposed Power of Siberia 2 pipeline could boost Russia’s gas exports to China, but only in the longer term. Gazprom has been promoting this project for nearly a decade, but there is no agreement yet on where the gas will come from and how it would get to China.
https://fortune.com/2022/04/06/china-buys-russia-energy-exports-oil-gas-coal-ukraine-sanctions-thane-gustafson/
We’re one C-17 flight away from every Russian military base in occupied Crimea being a smoking ruin. Putinists best be careful what they ask for. They might get it.
Just for fun, let’s wait a while and see whom collapses because of energy issues first, and whose policies backfire the bestest, Europe or Russia.