Russian Gas Exports To Europe Have Collapsed To The Level Of The Early 1970s
- 2.07.2025, 13:47
Gazprom de facto has nowhere to put the extra gas.
The termination of the contract for Russian gas transit through Ukraine has hit Gazprom's latest deliveries to European countries, writes The Moscow Times.
In January-June 2025, the Russian gas monopoly pumped only 8.33 billion cubic meters of gas to European customers, Reuters calculated on the basis of daily statistics of Turkish Stream, the last operating pipeline for deliveries to Europe.
As compared to the same period last year (15.5 billion cubic meters), Gazprom's exports to what was once its largest market collapsed by another 47%. And by the end of the year, it will hardly exceed 16 billion cubic meters - the maximum capacity of the European branch of Turkish Stream.
Russia has not pumped so little gas to Europe since the early 1970s. For comparison: in 1975, it was 19.3 billion cubic meters, and in 1980, after the "gas for pipes" deal and a major contract with Germany, it was 54.8 billion cubic meters. Before the war with Ukraine, Gazprom's exports to Europe reached 200 billion cubic meters at their peak, and since then they have collapsed 12 times.
Gazprom has nowhere to put the extra gas. The Power of Siberia pipeline to China, launched in 2019, will compensate for only a fifth of the lost volumes, and years of negotiations to build a new pipe have ended in nothing. The project of a gas hub in Turkey, which the Kremlin announced in 2022, expecting to open a new European gas exchange and reshape the local market, has failed.
Last year, Gazprom's production totaled 416.19 billion cubic meters, of which only 355.23 billion managed to sell on foreign and domestic markets. As a result, Gazprom was left with about 60 billion cubic meters of unsold gas - a volume comparable to the annual production of some gas-producing countries (55 billion cubic meters in the UAE) and three times the annual consumption, for example, in Poland (20 billion cubic meters).
Company officials and top managers are looking for ways to use the extra gas, but they don't see a solution yet: the Ministry of Energy proposes to use it to power data centers and artificial intelligence projects, while the Ministry of Energy suggests using it to support the coal industry, which needs gas-fired power plants near mines. The Kremlin is hatching even more exotic plans to export 55 billion cubic meters a year to Iran, which itself has the world's second-largest gas reserves and the largest South Pars field on the planet.
Gazprom, meanwhile, is drowning in losses: in 2023, it lost 629 billion rubles according to international financial reporting standards, and in 2024, although it reported a profit of 1.2 trillion rubles, it remained in a deep minus with its key gas business: it made a net loss of 1 trillion rubles.
The company's own calculations show that in 2025-34, due to the lack of export opportunities, it faces losses of 15 trillion rubles. Gazprom's management estimated the negative cash flow in the next decade at this amount, the Financial Times wrote with reference to the company's closed presentation.