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Against a backdrop of global economic recovery, Dr Hooman Peimani discusses Russia's most prominent pipeline projects and their increasing supply of gas to Europe.
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021 may not necessarily be a significantly better year than the last year for the Russian pipeline industry, which did reasonably well in 2020, taking into consideration the expanding global recession. The substantially lower demand for energy – particularly oil and, to a lesser extent, gas – as a result of the extensive COVID19 lockdowns and decreasing industrial activities, on the one hand, and the uncertainty about the date of restoration of pre-pandemic normalcy, on the other, created doubt about the wisdom of investing in new pipelines when fossil energy prices were in free fall. Piped gas prices reflected this trend to a lesser extent compared to oil ones, as, for various reasons, demand for piped gas, but not LNG, remained close to that of the pre-pandemic era during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. That prevented a huge reduction in their prices, as experienced by oil prices. Against a background of a major economic recovery in the world’s largest energy consumer (China) and containing the pandemic in some of the major economies of the Asia-Pacific region (e.g., Singapore, Taiwan, Australia and New Zealand), the availability of various vaccines at the end of 2020 and the following vaccination programme against COVID-19 created confidence in restoring economic and social normalcy in the following year to require a steady incremental demand for energy, particularly oil and gas. The co-ordinated efforts of OPEC+ countries, including Russia as the largest
