Gazprom in search of growth in Europe

Russia’s Gazprom is looking to gain an even larger gas market share in Europe following record-high 2018 exports, expecting a decline in Europe’s gas output combined with rising demand, a senior manager at the company said.

In 2018 it sold more than 200-billion cubic metres of gas to Europe, including Turkey, while its gas market share in the region rose to more than a third.

Exports chief Elena Burmistrova said Gazprom would be able to offset a production decline in the EU, mainly at the Netherlands’s Groningen.

“North Sea production is also gradually declining so, the space for Russian gas is being freed up,” she said on the sidelines of the European Gas conference in Vienna.

EU gas production will halve by 2040, says the Paris-based International Energy Agency.

Moscow has piped gas to Europe from Siberia and northern Russia for more than 50 years. It can ill afford losing the lucrative market for Kremlinrun Gazprom, whose sales account for more than 5% of Russia’s $1.6-trillion economy.

Burmistrova said Gazprom was striving to raise its market share in Europe, where the company generates two-thirds of its gas sales.

“According to preliminary estimates, our share [in Europe] stood at 34% in 2017, while in 2018 it could have reached around 35%,” Burmistrova said in remarks cleared for publication on Wednesday.

Russian energy sales have become increasingly politicised since 2014 following the annexation of the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine, accusations of meddling in the US presidential election in 2016 and a nerve gas attack in Britain.