Energy in Russia
[2] Russia is a leading global exporter of oil and natural gas[3] and is the fourth highest greenhouse emitter in the world.
[16] Russia's oil and gas production has led to deep economic relationships with the European Union, China, and former Soviet and Eastern Bloc states.
[17][18][16] During the 2010s, Russia's share of supplies to total European Union (including the United Kingdom) gas demand grew from 25% in 2009 to 32% in the weeks before the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
[18] Russia relies heavily on revenues from oil- and gas-related taxes and export tariffs, which accounted for 45% of its federal budget in January 2022.
Russia is looking to develop the Power of Siberia 2 pipeline, with a capacity of 50 bcm/year, which would supply China from the West Siberian gas fields.
While climate change threatens future investment in the region, it also presents Russia with the opportunity of increasing access to Arctic trade routes, allowing for further flexibility for seaborne deliveries of fossil fuels, particularly to Asia, provided sanctions permit the construction of specialist ice breaking LNG tankers.
Russia has oil and gas production facilities throughout the country, but the bulk of its fields are concentrated in western and eastern Siberia.
[citation needed] In 2012, Russia launched the 4,740 km 1.6 million bpd Eastern Siberia—Pacific Ocean oil pipeline, which sends crude directly to Asian markets such as China and Japan.
The pipeline was part of Russia's general energy pivot to Asia, a strategy focused on shifting export dependence away from Europe, and taking advantage of growing Asian demand for crude.
Russia has an estimated 6.9 million bpd of refining capacity, and produces a substantial amount of oil products, such as gasoline and diesel.
Russian companies have spent the last decade investing heavily in refining capacity in order to take advantage of favorable government taxation, as well as growing global diesel demand.
[3][obsolete source] Russia's energy strategy prioritizes self-sufficiency in gasoline, so it tends to export minimal volumes.
However, Russian refiners produced roughly double the diesel needed to satisfy domestic demand, and typically exported half their annual production, much of it to European markets.
[29] Since the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, European sanctions have forced Russia to intensify the reorientation of its coal exports towards Asia.
The Siberian Lena and Tunguska basins are largely unexplored resources, which would probably be difficult to exploit commercially.
[40] Geothermal resources have been identified in the Northern Caucasus, Western Siberia, Lake Baikal, and in Kamchatka and the Kuril Islands.
This potential is largely unused, although the possibilities for off-grid solar energy or hybrid applications in remote areas are huge.
[42] Russia has high quality wind resources on the Pacific and Arctic coasts and in vast steppe and mountain areas.
Large-scale wind energy systems are suitable in Siberia and the Far East (east of Sakhalin Island, the south of Kamchatka, the Chukotka Peninsula, Vladivostok), the steppes along the Volga river, the northern Caucasus steppes and mountains and on the Kola Peninsula, where power infrastructure and major industrial consumers are in place.
[43] A small pilot tidal power plant with a capacity of 400 kW was constructed at Kislaya Guba near Murmansk in 1968.
In 2007, Gidro OGK, a subsidiary of the Unified Energy System (UES) began the installation of a 1.5 MW experimental orthogonal turbine at Kislaya Guba.
Russia exports electricity to the CIS countries, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, China, Poland, Turkey and Finland.
Russian billionaires in energy by Forbes in 2013 included No 41 Mikhail Fridman ($16.5 B), No 47 Leonid Michelson ($15.4 B), 52 Viktor Vekselberg ($15.1 B), 55 Vagit Alekperov ($14.8 B), 56 Andrey Melnichenko ($14.4 B), 62 Gennady Timchenko ($14.1 B), 103 German Khan ($10.5 B), 138 Alexei Kuzmichov ($8.2 B), 162 Leonid Fedun ($7.1 B), 225 Pyotr Aven ($5.4 B), 423 Vladimir Bogdanov ($3.2 B), 458 Mikhail Gutseriev ($3 B), 641 Alexander Dzhaparidze ($2.3 B), 792 Igor Makarov ($1.9 B), 882 Anatoly Skurov ($1.7 B), 974 Vladimir Gridin and family ($1.5 B), 974 Andrei Kosogov ($1.5 B), 1031Farkhad Akhmedov ($1.4 B), 1088 Alexander Putilov ($1.35 B), 1161 Mikhail Abyzov ($1.25 B) and 1175 Konstantin Grigorishin ($1.2 B).
