Gazprom management held a conference call on the company’s financial results of 3Q21 on November 29. The Q&A session was mostly focused on the company’s plans for the rest of this year and into the next one.
Our key take-away is that the company’s management did not reaffirm export target for this year and seems to be working on the assumption of high gas prices in Europe in the coming months. This would suggest that Gazprom might be reluctant to increase gas supplies to Europe until the Nord Stream-2 pipeline (NS2) is approved.
As discussed in ourNovember Russian gas report, we see some availability of Russian gas for additional exports in December. We also believe that the prospect of successful certification of NS2 may have improved if Gazprom were to fully utilise available transit capacity for gas exports to Europe in the coming months.
In our view, the approval of NS2 might drag on well into the next year. This means that the NS-2 capacity might not be operational in 2022. This corresponds to our pessimistic scenario for Russian gas supplies to Europe in 2022. However, we still forecast Gazprom to export to Europe (inc. Turkey) to increase 4 bcm to 174 bcm in 2022.
Below are brief comments on these and other points of interest.