Russia is set to raise further its natural gas pipeline supply to China after state giants Gazprom and China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) signed an agreement on Thursday for the delivery of additional volumes of Russian gas to China through the end of 2023.
The deliveries, via the Power of Siberia pipeline from Russia to China, will be raised under an addendum to the sale and purchase agreement for gas for 2023, Russian news agency Interfax reported on Thursday.
Earlier this year, Alexey Miller, the chief executive officer of Gazprom, said that the Russian gas giant accounted for more than half of the rise in China's natural gas imports between January and August this year.
Russia's state gas giant has relied on more natural gas exports to China as sales to Europe have plummeted since the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
"At the same time, we see that the Chinese gas market is growing. China's gas imports have increased over the eight months of this year. And more than half of the increase in these supplies imported to the Chinese market was provided by Gazprom," Miller was quoted as saying at the end of August.
Gazprom supplies natural gas to China via the Power of Siberia pipeline. Deliveries in 2022 stood at 15 billion cubic meters, while total flows for the whole of this year were expected to rise to 22 billion cubic meters.
The Power of Siberia was one of the biggest projects recently completed by Gazprom and the first conduit for Russian gas to China. Now, there's talk about Power of Siberia 2, but talks between Russia and China haven't progressed much.
On Thursday, Gazprom said it was working on the infrastructure design for the new natural gas pipeline to China from Russia's Far East.
Earlier this week, Gazprom's CEO Alexey Miller said that Russia could soon supply China with volumes of gas comparable with the volumes Moscow sent to Western Europe before the invasion of Ukraine.
Before the war in Ukraine, Russia supplied around one-third of all the gas to Europe.
Analysts doubt that Russia could boost volumes to China to such levels for at least another seven years, according to Russian daily Vedomosti.
By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com
Tsvetana is a writer for Oilprice.com with over a decade of experience writing for news outlets such as iNVEZZ and SeeNews. More