Climate crisis: Russia planning major increase in gas exports, despite customers’ net-zero ambitions

Country also aiming to become major producer of clean-burning hydrogen fuel

Russia has no plans to rein in its production and export of fossil fuels (Getty Images)

Australia isn’t the only country plotting a “gas-led recovery” to rebuild the economy after the impact of the coronavirus pandemic — Russia is also planning to exploit its own enormous fossil fuel reserves amid the worsening global climate crisis.

The Kremlin has not set out a net-zero emissions target, and the energy minister Alexander Novak has said he believes after a contraction in the market due to the pandemic, Russian exports of oil and gas will continue to grow in 2021.

Russia became one of the world’s top five global liquid natural gas (LNG) producers last year, and by 2035 Russia is expected to increase production from the current 29 million to 140 million metric tons of LNG per year, according to Mr Novak, who held a video conference with energy ministers from other Bric countries (Brazil, India and China), earlier this month.

In 2018, Russia exported 243 billion cubic meters of gas through pipelines to European countries along with 24 billion cubic meters of LNG. The UK is the biggest European importer of Russian gas, according to Gazprom — Russia’s partially state-owned energy corporation.

LNG emits around half the amount of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide than coal, and as demand for coal falls sharply, Russia is betting on sustained demand for gas.

“I believe natural gas to be an eco-friendly energy source,” Mr Novak told The Guardian.

“We believe that the share of natural gas in the global energy mix will only increase. We believe this to apply not only to Europe, but globally too.”

But despite his confidence, the International Energy Agency has forecast a short lived increase in gas demand in Europe, and then a fall of up to 8 per cent from 2019 levels by the end of the decade.

Mr Novak also said Russia was aiming to become a major global producer of hydrogen — a clean-burning alternative to natural gas, which can be obtained through electrolysis of water, which splits the hydrogen atoms from the oxygen atom, and if powered by renewables, is considered clean energy. Hydrogen can also be obtained through pyrolysis, in which the hydrogen is obtained from hydrogen-containing compounds such as hydrocarbons.

With exactly a year until the UN’s Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow, and five years since the Paris climate agreement came into existence, governments failing to rein in greenhouse gases are coming under increasing pressure to act.

Last week, Australian prime minister Scott Morrison refused to set out a net zero target and said he was not concerned about exports of coal and gas, despite the country’s largest four trading partners adopting net zero emissions targets and the two fossil fuels accounting for a quarter of all Australian exports by value.

China, South Korea and Japan have all recently adopted net-zero targets for the middle of the century.