IEA: Russia's gas market share will never recover to pre-war levels

The International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts that Russia will never be able to regain the position in the global natural gas market that it had before its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. This is stated in its forecast World Energy Outlook .

Russia's share in global gas trade, which was almost 25% in 2021, will fall to 10% by 2035, according to the baseline forecast, but in no scenario will Russia manage to get close to pre-war levels, the IEA writes.

As a result,, Russia's revenues from gas exports will fall from $120 billion a year in the 2010s to just $28 billion a year in the 2030s.

The full-scale war against Ukraine and the attempt to "freeze Europe" in 2022 completely destroyed Russia's export strategy. It began to reduce gas supplies to Europe itself, and now The European Union plans to abandon the volumes that are still being supplied .

While before the invasion Russia planned to export more than 300 billion cubic meters of gas by 2024, the actual volumes were less than 160 billion cubic meters – a drop of almost half.

"Even if the fighting in Ukraine stops, we do not expect Russian gas to return to Europe in large volumes, especially given the relatively comfortable global supply balance in the second half of the 2020s," the report says.

Russia is trying to compensate for the losses by increasing exports to China. The Power of Siberia-1 gas pipeline is operating at full capacity of 38 billion cubic meters per year, but the construction of the 50 billion cubic meter Power of Siberia-2 gas pipeline remains in doubt .

The Chinese market looks well supplied even without this project, and price negotiations are difficult, says IEA.

• The first signal of problems in Russian gas exports came in March 2024, when it became known that Gazprom's core business had begun to make losses .