Page 122 - RusRPTJul21

A deputy prime minister said Russia wants to make the fossil-fuel-rich Pacific island of Sakhalin carbon neutral by 2025, and then expand the goal to its top oil-producing region in western Siberia, Reuters reports. Sakhalin Island, which produces 400,000 barrels of oil per day (bpd) and houses an LNG facility, with emission of close to 1.5mn tons of CO2 equivalent each year. Russian emissions total 2.1bn tons of CO2 equivalent per year, with fossil fuels accounting for the majority of this. According to Abramchenko, who cited internal statistics, the country absorbs 2.5bn tons of CO2 equivalent through its huge woods.
The combined installed capacity of windmill farms in Russia’s Rostov Region should reach 1 gigawatt (GW) in 2024, which is comparable to one reactor of a nuclear power plant, Governor Vasily Golubev told PRIME late on June 4. The wind power projects were launched around three years ago in the region. “I suppose that (the combined capacity) will amount to 1 GW in 2024. For comparison, this is one nuclear reactor, it is a lot,” he said. Golubev signed a cooperation agreement with German company SoWiTec operation GmbH that is to draft a project of a 10bn ruble windmill farm in the region.
President Vladimir Putin has submitted to the State Duma for ratification the protocol on amending the Agreement on the Eurasian Economic Union (Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan) from 2014 as regards the formation of a single electricity market. The protocol is aimed at improving the energy security of the countries, creating a legal space for fair competition and the conditions for increasing the efficiency and competitiveness of the countries in the electricity sector, as well as strengthening cooperation. The document is to be the base for developing the legislation to definethe operation of the single electricity market.
The single EEU market for electricity was originally due to be brought on line by 1 July 2019, but was then postponed until 1 January 2025, with the legislation to be worked out before that. The goal of the single market is to enable electricity trading in various ways and to move to a single wholesale electricity market.
We note that the current tariff regimes in the various countries differ. Russia has a liberalised market, while there are regulated tariffs in most EEU countries. Russia does not have a CO2 trading mechanism (apart from the pilot project in Sakhalin) while Kazakhstan, for example, does. Thus, the development of a single market could have a large effect on the electricity system in Russia. For now, there are still a lot of questions that need to be answered before the plan can be properly implemented, and it seems that the work on drawing up the legislation is going to accelerate.
On Wednesday 2 June, Minister of Energy Nikolai Shulginov and other representatives of the ministry made a number of comments at the St Petersburg Economic Forum. The key
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