"We live like in olden times," a resident of the small city of Minusinsk, some 450 kilometers south of the capital of Siberia's sprawling Krasnoyarsk Krai, said while describing how he heats his home with buckets of coal. "It's awful running out in the freezing cold to fetch it, but what can I do? We are helpless."
Some 12 kilometers from Minusinsk, near the settlement of Bystraya, is one of many locations in Russia's eastern regions where natural gas bubbles up out of the ground. In the summer, locals bring sausages and other food to cook over the open "eternal flames."
That gas field, as well as the Novo-Mikhailovsky gas field just 50 kilometers away, has been deemed uneconomical to develop. As in Minusinsk, homes in Bystraya are heated primarily with coal.
Although Russia is a global leader in the production of natural gas, millions of residents of its coldest, easternmost regions remain unconnected to gas lines. And Russia's costly war against neighboring Ukraine -- now in its third year since the full-scale invasion with no end in sight -- is eroding any chances that will change soon.
"I would pay to get gas," the older man from Minusinsk added.* "But how much? There are no gas lines. No infrastructure. No estimate of the cost to the consumer. We aren't even dreaming about getting gas."
Hard Times
Connecting consumers in Siberia and the Far East to natural-gas lines has been a dream since Soviet times. Putin made it an issue in his 2004 election campaign, and he has been regularly queried about it during his nationally televised Direct Line question-and-answer sessions.
Yet the connection rates remain minuscule: 1 percent in the Irkutsk region and even less in Khakassia, Tyva, and most of Krasnodar Krai. Across the region each winter, officials regularly issued air-quality warnings because of the smog from burning coal. In 2021, children from Minusinsk donned gas masks and recorded video appeals in which they begged Putin to do something about their community's "black skies."
Responsibility for the gasification program has primarily fallen to the state-controlled natural-gas monopoly Gazprom, which has reported some progress in the effort in recent years. In January, the government said access to natural gas -- which officials refer to as gasification -- had increased from 73 percent to 73.8 percent in 2023, with 485,000 homes reportedly being connected to the network.
At a meeting in the Kremlin in December 2023, Gazprom CEO Aleksei Miller told President Vladimir Putin that the gasification of Russia would "absolutely" be 100 percent completed by 2030.
Such optimistic forecasts notwithstanding, Gazprom is facing hard times. Last month, the behemoth reported an annual loss for 2023 of 629 billion rubles ($7.1 billion), its first annual loss in a quarter-century. The revenues lost from sharply declining sales to Europe in the wake of Moscow's February 2022 invasion of Ukraine have not nearly been compensated by increased sales to China, with Beijing -- from a position of strength -- negotiating terms far less lucrative than what Europe has been paying. In 2023, Russia was selling gas to China for $257 per 1,000 cubic meters, while Europe and Turkey were paying $320.
A Gazprom-commissioned analysis written in late 2023 said it was unlikely the company would be able to achieve 2020 export levels any earlier than 2035, the Financial Times reported on June 5. Analysts told the paper Gazprom is pressing the government to raise domestic gas prices or provide the company tax breaks or other subsidies.
In April, the Russian business daily Kommersant also reported that Gazprom was lobbying the government to "liberalize" domestic gas rates in connection with "the fall in exports since the beginning of military action in Ukraine."
Oil-and-gas industry analyst Mikhail Krutikhin told RFE/RL that Moscow and Gazprom are making a mistake by pinning their hopes on sales to China, where future demand is uncertain. Instead of building new infrastructure to sell more gas to Beijing, he argued, Gazprom should look closer to home.
"They could be doing something for the domestic market," he told RFE/RL's Russian Service. "They could step up, intensify the gasification of Russian settlements. But this is not happening. Instead, Gazprom goes after another grandiose project that the Chinese haven't even signed off on: the Power of Siberia-2 gas pipeline."
'Not In Our Lifetimes'
In March 2023, when the government of Khakassia submitted a gasification plan to the central government comprising three possible ways forward, the Energy Ministry responded that "because of the distance separating Khakassia from the existing gas infrastructure, it is now necessary to consider alternative ways" of reducing the harm from coal heating, including developing electric heating or more modern coal furnaces.
"Gasification is not coming," said a resident of the town of Chernogorsk, 5 kilometers north of Abakan. "At least not in our lifetimes. They talk about such projects every year, since some election or another is always happening…. I know the process is complicated, but if it isn't going to happen, they shouldn't promise it."
A resident of the city of Krasnoyarsk agreed, noting the authorities have also been building a subway system in the city since 1995.
"You can see how they are 'building' us a metro and 'bringing' us gas," he said. "We are a city of 1 million people, a region that sends more money to Moscow than it takes. We are pumping gas to China, while we ourselves breathe coal smoke."
